Susan T. Fiske

Susan Tufts Fiske is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, and prejudice. She has authored over 175 publications and has written 7 books, including her most recent work Social Beings: A Core Motives Approach to Social Psychology. Social Cognition, a graduate level text she wrote with her dissertation advisor, Shelley Taylor, defined the now-popular subfield of social cognition; a new version was published in 2008. She also edits the Annual Review of Psychology (with Daniel Schacter & Robert Sternberg) and the Handbook of Social Psychology (with Daniel Gilbert & the late Gardner Lindzey).

Fiske received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1978. According to her chapter in the 1994 text The Social Psychologists: Research Adventures, she was still in graduate school when she coined the term 'cognitive misers' to refer to individuals' tendencies to use cognitive shortcuts and heuristics. She also popularized the phrase 'thinking is for doing' (paraphrased from William James, "My thinking is first and last and always for my doing").

Fiske was the first social psychologist to testify in gender discrimination cases, including the landmark Hopkins v Price Waterhouse, ultimately heard by the Supreme Court.

She is a past President of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and current President of the Foundation for the Advancement of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. She was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Fiske is married to sociologist Douglas Massey.