Her father, Donald W. Fiske, was an influential psychologist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago.
In 1969, Susan Fiske enrolled at Radcliffe College for her undergraduate degree in social relations, where she graduated magna cum laude in 1973.
[1] She received her PhD from Harvard University in 1978, for her thesis titled Attention and the Weighting of Behavior in Person Perception.
She gave expert testimony in the landmark case, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins which was eventually heard by the Supreme Court of the United States,[6] making her the first social psychologist to testify in a gender discrimination case.
[7] Working with Peter Glick, Fiske analyzed the interdependence of male-female interactions, leading to the development of ambivalent sexism theory.
[8] Fiske worked with Peter Glick and Amy Cuddy to develop the Stereotype Content Model.
[5] This field examines how neural systems are involved in social processes, such as person perception.
[9] Fiske's own work has examined neural systems involved in stereotyping,[10] intergroup hostility,[11] and impression formation.
Other books include Envy Up, Scorn Down: How Status Divides Us, which describes how people constantly compare themselves to others, with toxic effects on their relationships at home, at work, in school, and in the world,[14] and The Human Brand: How We Relate to People, Products, and Companies.
[22][23] The stereotype content model (SCM) is a psychological theory arguing that people tend to perceive social groups along two fundamental dimensions: warmth and competence.
[28] A group's perceived status predicts its stereotypic competence, so this reflects a belief in meritocracy, that people get what they deserve.
[28] Fiske and Peter Glick developed the ambivalent sexism inventory (ASI) as a way of understanding prejudice against women.
[32] Power-as-control theory aims to explain how social power motivates people to heed or ignore others.
[35][36][37][38] In a letter intended for publication in APS Observer, she referred to these unnamed "adversaries" as "methodological terrorist" and "self-appointed data police", and said that criticism of psychology should only be expressed in private or through contacting the journals.
[35] Columbia University statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman, "well-respected among the researchers driving the replication debate", responded to Fiske, saying that she had found herself willing to tolerate the "dead paradigm" of faulty statistics and had refused to retract publications even when errors were pointed out.
[35] After the leak of her letter, she tempered the language in the published APS Observer column, removing the term "methodological terrorists".