Susan T. Fiske

Princeton University | PU · Department of Psychology

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.107256.].

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) increasingly suffuses everyday life. However, people are frequently reluctant to interact with A.I. systems. This challenges both the deployment of beneficial A.I. technology and the development of deep learning systems that depend on humans for oversight, direction, and regulation. Nine studies (N = 3,300) demonstrat...

Stories have played a central role in human social and political life for thousands of years. Despite their ubiquity in culture and custom, however, they feature only peripherally in formal government policymaking. Government policy has tended to rely on tools with more predictable responses—incentives, transfers, and prohibitions. We argue that st...

The animal stereotype approach dissolves 'animals' into diverse images depending on their species. First, we reviewed recent research showing the attributes socially ascribed to different animal species. Next, we discussed how the animal stereotype approach may complement dehumanization by broadening the distinct forms of animalized dehumanization...

People belong to multiple social groups simultaneously. However, much remains to be learned about the rich semantic perceptions of multiply-categorized targets. Two pretests and three main studies (n = 1,116) compare perceptions of single social categories to perceptions of two intersecting social categories. Unlike previous research focusing on sp...

Public policy at Princeton University has flourished with the involvement of psychology research. This chapter illustrates connections by applying psychology research to public policy. As an example, social cognition insights can inform policy in the domain of prejudice and discrimination. Levels of prejudice show that individuals cannot monitor so...

This collection of first-person accounts from legendary social psychologists tells the stories behind the science and offers unique insight into the development of the field from the 1950s to the present. One pillar, the grandson of a slave, was inspired by Kenneth Clark. Yet when he entered his PhD program in the 1960s, he was told that race was n...

The spontaneous stereotype content model (SSCM) describes a comprehensive taxonomy, with associated properties and predictive value, of social-group beliefs that perceivers report in open-ended responses. Four studies (N = 1,470) show the utility of spontaneous stereotypes, compared to traditional, prompted, scale-based stereotypes. Using natural l...

Inaccurate stereotypes—perceived differences among groups that do not actually differ—are prevalent and consequential. Past research explains stereotypes as emerging from a range of factors, including motivational biases, cognitive limitations, and information deficits. Considering the minimal forces required to produce inaccurate assumptions about...

Interaction and cooperation with humans are overarching aspirations of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Recent studies demonstrate that AI agents trained with deep reinforcement learning are capable of collaborating with humans. These studies primarily evaluate human compatibility through "objective" metrics such as task performance, obscurin...

Systemic racism is a scientifically tractable phenomenon, urgent for cognitive scientists to address. This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans. From American colonial history, explicit practices and policies reinforced disadvantage acr...

People form impressions about brands as they do about social groups. The Brands as Intentional Agents Framework (BIAF) a decade ago derived from the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) two dimensions of consumers' brand perception: warmth (worthy intentions) and competence (ability). The BIAF dimensions and their predictive validity have replicated the...

With increasing interconnectedness of the world, intensifying migration flows and the rise of the right-wing populism in many countries, the topic of intercultural relations has become more and more relevant. Cultural and linguistic diversity brings both opportunities and challenges by, on the one hand, enriching human communication and enhancing s...

Significance Contemporary world challenges—pandemic response, climate change, migration, global poverty, and trade policy—require comparative moral judgments (tradeoffs) between one’s own and other nations. Such choices distribute benefits and protect security for just the national in-group or the whole world. In representative surveys from eight c...

In “Making Sense of One Another in Crossing Borders: Social Cognition and Migration Politics,” special editors Ilka Vari-Lavoisier and Susan T. Fiske, with consulting editors Christophe Nordman and Douglas S. Massey, convene a group of scholars to discuss how “new intellectual approaches—ideas crossing disciplinary borders—can inform our understand...

Societal threats that face the world today seem overpowering, especially for young generations who will need to develop creative solutions. The present study examined the relationships between societal threats and social motives. Social motives function to orient individuals toward the social world and prepare them to engage socially. This adaptive...

People gather information about others along a few fundamental dimensions; their current goals determine which dimensions they most need to know. As proponents of competing social-evaluation models, we sought to study the dimensions that perceivers spontaneously prioritize when gathering information about unknown social groups. Because priorities d...

A new scale to measure core social motives was developed based on the BUC(K)ET framework (Belong, Understand, Control, Esteem, and Trust). The scale was completed by 1,516 university students from seven countries: Australia, the United States, New Zealand, the Philippines, Malaysia, China (Macao), and Austria. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysi...

This chapter compares five models that analyze social evaluation from the micro, interpersonal to macro, many-group level: the Dual Perspective Model (DPM), Behavioral Regulation Model (BRM), Dimensional Compensation Model (DCM), Stereotype Content Model (SCM), and Agency-Beliefs-Communion (ABC) Model. A proper understanding of social evaluation mu...

Advances in natural language processing provide accessible approaches to analyze psychological open‐ended data. However, comprehensive instruments for text analysis of stereotype content are missing. We developed stereotype content dictionaries using a semi‐automated method based on WordNet and word embeddings. These stereotype content dictionaries...

Social evaluation occurs at personal, interpersonal, group, and intergroup levels, with competing theories and evidence. Five models engage in adversarial collaboration, to identify common conceptual ground, ongoing controversies, and continuing agendas: Dual Perspective Model (Abele & Wojciszke, 2007); Behavioral Regulation Model (Leach, Ellemers,...

Race is fraught with meaning, but unequal status is central. Race-status associations (RSAs) link White Americans with high status and Black Americans with low status. RSAs could occur via observation of racially distributed jobs, perceived status-related stereotypic attributes, or simple ranking. Nine samples (N = 3,933) validate 3 novel measures...

Stereotypes are ideological and justify the existing social structure. Although stereotypes persist, they can change when the context changes. Communism’s rise in Eastern Europe and Asia in the 20th century provides a natural experiment examining social-structural effects on social class stereotypes. Nine samples from postcommunist countries (N = 2...

With globalization and immigration, societal contexts differ in sheer variety of resident social groups. Social diversity challenges individuals to think in new ways about new kinds of people and where their groups all stand, relative to each other. However, psychological science does not yet specify how human minds represent social diversity, in h...

Crises in science concern not only methods, statistics, and results but also, theory development. Beyond the indispensable refinement of tools and procedures, resolving crises would also benefit from a deeper understanding of the concepts and processes guiding research. Usually, theories compete, and some lose, incentivizing destruction of seemingl...

With increasing interconnectedness of the world, intensifying migration flows and the rise of the right-wing populism in many countries, the topic of intercultural relations has become more and more relevant. Cultural and linguistic diversity brings both opportunities and challenges by, on the one hand, enriching human communication and enhancing s...

How do people compare themselves to others who are relatively higher or lower in social status, and what are the interpersonal consequences of these status comparisons? This chapter reviews past and emerging research on interpersonal interactions that involve social comparisons across social status divides. The chapter begins with a framework for c...

Status and power stratification seem virtually inevitable in human societies. The advantages of the powerful and higher status are exaggerated by inequality, increasing cross-class resentment. Across nations, high-SES people are stereotyped as competent but cold and low-SES people as incompetent (and sometimes as warm). So, upper classes feel disli...

People commonly hold beliefs about social mobility, that is, perceptions of the likelihood to move up or down in society. What impact, if any, do these beliefs have on inequality, the societal status quo, and people’s own lives? How accurate are these views of where people end up in life and why? How can we characterize these beliefs? Through a rev...

Status (respect, prestige) and power (resource control) arguably form two kinds of inequality. Status differences appear culturally reasonable as vertical inequality-with a common rationale: meritocracy (deservingness). High-status individuals and groups are accorded competence. Status differences divide people by inequality, but so do differences...

Using the stereotype content model (SCM; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002) and the behaviors from intergroup affect and stereotypes (BIAS) map (Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2007), two experiments tested the effect of animal stereotypes on emotions and behavioral tendencies toward animals. As a novel approach, Study 1 ( N = 165) manipulated warmth and comp...

The stereotype content model (SCM), originating in the United States and generalized across nearly 50 countries, has yet to address ethnic relations in one of the world's most influential nations. Russia and the United States are somewhat alike (large, powerful, immigrant-receiving), but differ in other ways relevant to intergroup images (culture,...

Just as people seem to come in types (middle-class, rich, old, homeless), so do animals (pets, predators, prey, pests). The societal images of animal species reflect socially shared beliefs about different animals –social stereotypes. Similar to the case of human social groups, animal stereotypes could predict human emotions and behaviors toward di...

During the methods crisis in psychology and other sciences, much discussion developed online in forums such as blogs and other social media. Hence, this increasingly popular channel of scientific discussion itself needs to be explored to inform current controversies, record the historical moment, improve methods communication, and address equity is...

Most Whites, particularly sociopolitical liberals, now endorse racial equality. Archival and experimental research reveals a subtle but persistent ironic consequence: White liberals self-present less competence to minorities than to other Whites-that is, they patronize minorities stereotyped as lower status and less competent. In an initial archiva...

Researchers have shown that prejudice encourages explanations for inequality that attribute stigmatized groups’ negative outcomes to internal-controllable causes. We extended this research by investigating how ambivalent sexism affects attributions for gender income inequality. Hostile sexism should facilitate acceptance of gender income inequality...

Rich people inhabit a distinct social category that may elicit universal images or perhaps different perceptions in different cultures. Whereas inequality research has mostly focused on lower socioeconomic classes, the current research investigates cultural variations of prejudices about rich groups, toward understanding societal dynamics. Three st...

Two dimensions persist in social cognition when people are making sense of individuals or groups. The stereotype content model (SCM) terms these two basic dimensions perceived warmth (trustworthiness, friendliness) and competence (capability, assertiveness). Measured reliably and validly, these Big Two dimensions converge across survey, cultural, l...

Two studies investigate individuals' concerns about interpersonal interactions when interacting with higher- and lower-status others, and how individuals manage those concerns. Various coping strategies emerge, including hiding status differences between the self and an interaction partner, self-promoting or ingratiating, and specifically cooperati...

Is sexism a form of prejudice? Although the question might appear absurd, consider Allport’s (1954) influential definition of ethnic prejudice. Prejudice, Allport wrote, “is an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization” (p. 9). The existence of prejudice is commonly indexed by measures of antipathy, such as social distance (e.g.,...

Social class stereotypes support inequality through various routes: ambivalent content, early appearance in children, achievement consequences, institutionalization in education, appearance in cross-class social encounters, and prevalence in the most unequal societies. Class-stereotype content is ambivalent, describing lower-SES people both negativ...

Research on social categorization continues, with one growth area being multiple categorization. Various approaches study questions that, although different in scope and content, potentially tap the same underlying processes. Current models that aim to understand judgments about targets who belong to multiple social groups include algebraic and non...

Current research and theory from a range of disciplines on ageism, discussing issues from elder abuse to age discrimination against workers, revised and updated. People commonly use age to categorize and stereotype others–even though those who stereotype the elderly are eventually bound to become elderly themselves. Ageism is found cross-culturally...

People’s motivation to rationalize and defend the status quo is a major barrier to societal change. Three studies tested whether perceived social mobility—beliefs about the likelihood to move up and down the socioeconomic ladder—can condition people’s tendency to engage in system justification. Compared to information suggesting moderate social mob...

The Great Recession widened social-class divides, so social interactions across gaps in workplace status and in race generally may be more salient and more fraught. Different statuses and races both carry stereotypes that targets know (meta-perceptions, how they expect to be viewed by the outgroup). In both cross-status and cross-race interactions,...

Social class divides worsened during and after the Great Recession; this article documents one cultural feature of this divide, social-class stereotypes, both at the societal level (across nations) and at the individual level (personal beliefs about social-class groups and individuals). The Stereotype Content Model provides the shared theoretical f...

Significance Stereotypes reflect a society’s inequality and conflict, providing a diagnostic map of intergroup relations. This stereotype map’s fundamental dimensions depict each group’s warmth (friendly, sincere) and competence (capable, skilled). Some societies cluster groups as high on both (positive “us”) vs. low on both (negative “them”). Othe...

Dimensions of stereotypes, warmth and competence, may respond differentially to perceivers’ emotional involvement. Two studies tested the effect of being emotionally involved with a fictional immigrant target on stereotypic warmth but not competence dimension. Emotional involvement with a target affects the target’s perceived trustworthiness, warmt...

Nonhuman animals are typically excluded from the scope of social psychology. This article presents animals as social objects – targets of human social responses – overviewing the similarities and differences with human targets. The focus here is on perceiving animal species as social groups. Reflecting the two fundamental dimensions of humans’ soci...

Hierarchies in the correlated forms of power (resources) and status (prestige) are constants that organize human societies. This article reviews relevant social psychological literature and identifies several converging results concerning power and status. Whether rank is chronically possessed or temporarily embodied, higher ranks create psychologi...

Prior work describes specific, prescriptive resource tensions between generations , comprising active Succession, passive Consumption, and symbolic Identity (SCI; North and Fiske). The current paper focuses on how these domains potentially drive intergenerational exclusion in work-related networking and training spheres. Studies 1a–c—each focusing...

We hypothesized participants would adopt diverging impression management strategies when interacting with lower- versus higher-status others, to disconfirm status-based stereotypes of their own respective coldness or incompetence. In Study 1, downward comparers downplayed their own competence to appear warmer, and upward comparers downplayed their...

Ambivalent Sexism Theory (Glick & Fiske, 1996) addresses the often paradoxical nature of gender relations. Despite the continuing global reality of patriarchy, men and women routinely form and maintain intimate relationships. An interlocking set of misogynistic and paternalistic attitudes toward women, known as ambivalent sexism, resolves tension b...

Twenty-first century intergroup biases are more automatic, ambivalent, and ambiguous than were old-fashioned biases such as authoritarianism and overt racism, which overtly expressed intergroup hostility. Beyond traditional self-report measures of ethnocentrism and hostile sexism, current measures tap more subtle manifestations of bias. Social domi...

Consistent with Lewin's legacy and SPSSI's traditions, out work has focused on inequality and power dynamics between people. Drawing on interpersonal positivity biases, stereotype content emphasizing perceived warmth and competence, and on the compensation effect (trading off warmth and competence), we study how people communicate, understand, and...

The workforce is rapidly aging. Already at record highs, labor force participation rates of both over-55 and over-65 age segments are expected to nearly double in the immediate future. The current chapter describes how these sweeping demographic changes necessitate both the unprecedented utilization of older workers and intergenerational collaborat...

Social-perception dimensions may explain human-animal relationships because animals show intent toward humans (social perception’s warmth dimension) and, consequently, their potential effect on humans is relevant (competence dimension). After reviewing current literature about perceptions of animals’ ascribed intentions and abilities, three studies...

Prevailing beliefs suggest that Eastern cultures hold older adults in higher esteem than Western cultures do, due to stronger collectivist traditions of filial piety. However, in modern, industrialized societies, the strain presented by dramatic rises in population aging potentially threatens traditional cultural expectations. Addressing these comp...

This Agenda article first considers whether social psychology is in the best or worst of times and suggests that we are instead in extraordinary times, given exciting agendas and potential policy relevance, if we are careful. The article illustrates with two current research agendas—the hybrid vigor of multiple categories and the psychology of soci...

Social psychologists have studied stereotypes since the start of the twentieth century. Investigation proceeded at first descriptively, then in a process-oriented manner that evolved with the broader field into increasingly cognitive explanations, and now marrying those approaches to social neuroscience. The illustrative case is stereotype content,...

Discussing socioeconomic status in college classes can be challenging. Both teachers and students feel uncomfortable, yet social class matters more than ever. This is especially true, given increased income inequality in the United States and indications that higher education does not reduce this inequality as much as many people hope. Resources fr...

Significance This paper examines how detecting harmful intent creates downstream consequences for assessing damage, magnifying its cost. If intentional harms seem worse, society may spend more money on them than on objectively more damaging unintentional harms or on naturally occurring harms. Why might this occur? Various psychological theories ide...

The Stereotype Content Model (SCM) posits two fundamental dimensions of intergroup perception, warmth and competence, predicted by socio-structural dimensions of competition and status, respectively. However, the SCM has been challenged on claiming perceived competition as the socio-structural dimension that predicts perceived warmth. The current r...

People's social and political opinions are grounded in their moral concerns about right and wrong. We examine whether five moral foundations-harm, fairness, ingroup, authority, and purity-can influence political attitudes of liberals and conservatives across a variety of issues. Framing issues using moral foundations may change political attitudes...

Despite appreciating the importance of bridging–or perhaps because of it–we must also appreciate the challenges of any micro-macro interplay. Many psychological scientists work on social issues precisely because we are frustrated by the untested and often untenable psychological assumptions made by more macro social and economic sciences. At the ps...

Expertise is a prerequisite for communicator credibility, entailing the knowledge and ability to be accurate. Trust also is essential to communicator credibility. Audiences view trustworthiness as the motivation to be truthful. Identifying whom to trust follows systematic principles. People decide quickly another's apparent intent: Who is friend or...

Susan T. Fiske, chair of the National Research Council Committee on Revisions to the Common Rule for the Protection of Human Subjects in Research in the Behavioral and Social Sciences, and Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and …

When someone suffers a mishap, a setback or a downfall, we sometimes find ourselves experiencing schadenfreude - an emotion defined as deriving pleasure from another's misfortune. Schadenfreude is a common experience and an emotion which is seemingly inherent to social being. This book offers a comprehensive summary of current theoretical and empir...

Social categories both create and reflect inequality. Macro, overarching forces, and individual, perceiver biases each contribute. First, we review perspectives deriving from classic sociological and prevailing psychological social psychology, including both interpersonal fluidity and cognitive economy. Social psychologists have implicated several...

The negotiation of social order is intimately connected to the capacity to infer and track status relationships. Despite the foundational role of status in social cognition, we know little about how the brain constructs status from social interactions that display it. Although emerging cognitive neuroscience reveals that status judgments depend on...

We integrate two prominent models of social perception dimensionality. In three studies, we demonstrate how the well-established semantic differential dimensions of evaluation and potency relate to the stereotype content model dimensions of warmth and competence. Specifically, using a correlational design (Study 1) and experimental designs (Studies...

This comment highlights the relevance and importance of the uncertainty-extremism topic, both scientifically and societally, identifies common themes, locates this work in a wider scientific and social context, describes what we now know and what we still do not, acknowledges some limitations, foreshadows future directions, and discusses some poten...

People often fail to empathize with others, and sometimes even experience schadenfreude-pleasure at others' misfortunes. One potent predictor of schadenfreude is envy, which, according to the stereotype content model, is elicited by high-status, competitive targets. Here we review our recent research program investigating the relationships among st...

Research from a number of social psychological traditions suggests that social perceivers should be more concerned with evaluating others' intentions (i.e., warmth) relative to evaluating others' ability to act on those intentions (i.e., competence). The present research examined whether warmth evaluations have cognitive primacy over competence eva...

Recognizing or denying another's humanity varies predictably along apparently universal dimensions of the other's perceived warmth (trustworthiness) and competence. New data reveal distinct neural and behavioral signatures of (de)humanizing responses to distinct kinds of ingroups and outgroups on these dimensions. The most dehumanized outgroups (lo...

People and societies seek to combat harmful events. However, because resources are limited, every wrong righted leaves another wrong left unchecked. Responses must therefore be calibrated to the magnitude of the harm. One underappreciated factor that affects this calibration may be people's oversensitivity to intent. Across a series of studies, peo...

How do people maintain consistent impressions of other people when other people are often inconsistent? The present research addresses this question by combining recent neuroscientific insights with ecologically meaningful behavioral methods. Participants formed impressions of real people whom they met in a personally involving situation. fMRI and...

We introduce a novel ageism scale, focusing on prescriptive beliefs concerning potential intergenerational tensions: active, envied resource succession, symbolic identity avoidance, and passive, shared-resource consumption (SIC). Four studies (2,010 total participants) were used to develop the scale. Exploratory factor analysis formed an initial 20...

Perspectives on ageism have focused on descriptive stereotypes concerning what older people allegedly are. By contrast, we introduce prescriptive stereotypes that attempt to control how older people should be: encouraging active Succession of envied resources, preventing passive Consumption of shared resources, and avoidance of symbolic, ingroup id...

The compensation effect demonstrates a negative relationship between the dimensions of warmth and competence in impression formation in comparative contexts. However, does compensation between warmth and competence extend to impression management? Two studies examined whether people actively downplay their warmth in order to appear competent and do...

Ageism research tends to lump "older people" together as one group, as do policy matters that conceptualize everyone over-65 as "senior." This approach is problematic primarily because it often fails to represent accurately a rapidly growing, diverse, and healthy older population. In light of this, we review the ageism literature, emphasizing the i...