Social Cognition

Selected Works of Susan Fiske

Susan Fiske

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351739634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie sociale

In the World Library of Psychologists series, international experts present career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces—extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, and their major practical theoretical contributions.

Susan T. Fiske has an international reputation as an eminent scholar and pioneer in the field of social cognition. Throughout her distinguished career, she has investigated how people make sense of other people, using shortcuts that reveal prejudices and stereotypes. Her research in particular addresses how these biases are encouraged or discouraged by social relationships, such as cooperation, competition, and power. In 2013, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and, in 2011, to the British Academy. She has also won several scientific honours, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, the APS William James Fellow Award, as well as the European Federation of Psychologists' Associations Wundt-James Award and honorary degrees in Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland.

This collection of selected publications illustrates the foundations of modern social cognition research and its development in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In a specially written introductory chapter, Fiske traces the key advances in social cognition throughout her career, and so this book will be invaluable reading for students and researchers in social cognition, person perception, and intergroup bias.

1 Not your grandparents’ social cognition

A family letter about progress through crisis

Susan T. Fiske

Widely acknowledged as the founders of psychological science, Wilhelm Wundt and William James might also qualify as ancestors to social cognition researchers. Among other themes, Wundt (1897) viewed humans as motivated, thinking subjects, and James (1913) viewed humans as pragmatic thinkers for action. In those broad senses, they are our intellectual forebears. Social cognition research has deep roots.

William James summered in the cool mountains of Chocorua, New Hampshire, in a rambling brown house. So did my great-grandmother, Mary Hutchinson Page, except her house was rambling and white. Family legend and the National Historic Register claim that she and her friends ‘frequently walked up [the hill] to enjoy the sunsets, where they had lively discus sions about suffragettes, religion, prohibition, and living simply’ (Bowditch, 2005). One of those friends was William James, with whom she discussed her spiritual experiences, according to family legend. My great-grandmother was also a serious suffragist, as was her daughter. This is all to say that my family connection to psychological research (and to social issues) goes back some generations.

Family tradition inspired this essay’s framework, a letter to my social psychologist daughter, Lydia Fiske Emery, about the psychological concerns of her forebears and of her own generation. The essay illustrates an intellectual history of social cognition research, using my selected work, but with visits from Lydia’s forebears.

Crisis in replicability, relevance, theory, methods

All sciences undergo both gradual and sudden change as a function of ongoing discovery and self-correction. Sudden changes are harder to absorb. Crises in the field challenge a fresh PhD to evaluate the state of the field and her potential role in it. Just as now, in 1978, we had a crisis in social psychology, and the issues overlapped the current ones (Fiske, 2017), including replicability, relevance, theory, and methods.

These issues persist from the early crises of scientific psychology (Giner-Sorolla, 2012). In his own time, Lydia’s grandfather, my father Donald Fiske, faced related issues of replicability, relevance, theory, and methods, during his career starting in the 1940s. His quantitatively rigorous graduate research failed to replicate a senior professor’s observations about body shape and personality. Moreover, extant personality measurement methods needed work, in order to be relevant to World War II’s need to select personnel scientifically. Theory seemed unfalsifiable, as in the Freud my father later handed me when I wanted to learn about his field (a curious choice, as it did not represent his work at all). Finally, he grew concerned, as scientific findings did not replicate across distinct methods.

My father addressed all these issues as a methodologist who pioneered the use of multiple measures to show convergent and divergent validity. The multi-trait, multi-method matrix (Campbell & Fiske, 1959) was the most-cited article in Psychological Bulletin’s first 100 years. Advancing scientific methods was his response to crisis in early twentieth-century American psychology. He also first discovered the precursors to the Big Five personality trait factors (D. W. Fiske, 1949), advancing substance as well as methods.

During the 1970s crisis, we faced these recurring issues of replication, rele vance, theory, and methods. When I was a fresh PhD, we heard rumors that some flashy results did not replicate; only the original lab could pull them off. Social psychology then was dominated by laboratory experiments on cognitive dissonance and consistency theories more generally. That work seemed to us young firebrands to be irrelevant to pressing social problems: war, civil rights, environment. Besides being irreproducible and irrelevant, the field seemed stuck on grand theory, not practical, down-to-earth, falsifiable midrange theory. Finally, dubious method artifacts (e.g. experimenter expectancy) called into question all our findings. Or so it seemed to skeptics of the time.

Several responses advanced the field beyond crisis. Arguably, social cognition research was one such response (for others, see Taylor, 1998). Social cognitive approaches answered the crisis by offering precision and reliability, generating fine-grained falsifiable theories, borrowing rigorous methods from more micro areas such as cognitive science, and addressing relevant issues such as stereotyping.

Social cognition models as crisis response

Social cognition approaches developed in stages. The main part of the essay illustrates each phase. Immodestly, but because of the venue, all these illustrations come from my lab over the years. Countless others’ work would serve as well or better (for review, see Fiske & Taylor, 1984, 2017). But, these are the examples I know best. The articles exemplify various ways the field has characterized social perceivers: cognitive misers, motivated tacticians, activated actors, and inequality enablers. The end of the essay samples some of our current work to illustrate our ongoing responses to Crisis 3.0.

Cognitive misers: The origins of social cognition research

Mid-century social psychology had generated many motivational meta-theories (e.g. drive for consistency) and some rational-actor models (e.g. reasoned attitudes driven by self-interest motives). Social cognition approaches dispensed with motivation, pushing purely cognitive explanations to their limits. Along the way, those cognitive mechanisms dethroned that rational actor who makes reasonable decisions, instead revealing a litany of fallibility, due to the human thinker’s imperfections. This toppling of the old models was front and center, as the field first modeled the person perceiver as a cognitive miser—saving scarce online processing capacity by taking shortcuts, such as stereotypes and decision-making heuristics (Fiske & Taylor, 2017).

To illustrate, one cognitive shortcut assumes a moderately positive default for other people, all else being equal. A new acquaintance who is typically nice and sufficiently capable requires few online resources to get to know; conventional expectations can apply. In contrast, someone negative (mean or stupid) requires more scrutiny, as does someone extreme in either direction (monstrous or saintly, an idiot or a genius). The key cognitive-miser prediction is that deviation from the (moderately positive) baseline is informative and triggers effort. Diagnostic information elicits both attention and weight in the overall impression (Fiske, 1980): Pairs of photographs depicted an individual’s degree of (un)friendliness and civic (dis)engagement. As predicted, perceivers’ looking time and algebraic weight in forming an impression each reflected both negativity and extremity. Cognitive misers did not bother much with people who fit the baseline, reserving effort for when it mattered (informative negativity or extremes).

To explain when people do and do not go beyond shortcuts, such as defaults, a framework built on this and related work (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Fiske, Lin, & Neuberg, 1999). In the continuum model, perceivers start with a shortcut impression, categorizing the other person by salient cues, such as gender, race, age. People prioritize these category-based impressions, stopping there if fit is good enough for their everyday purposes (e.g. interacting with the cashier). If fit is not good (e.g. the cashier’s gender is ambiguous) or motivation is high (e.g. the cashier is the friend of a friend), the perceiver devotes more attention. Increased attention can move impressions from simple category-based stereotyping to subgrouping to fully individuated, attribute-based impressions.

Cognitive misers show up in all kinds of places, from shipyards to investment banks. To illustrate one relevant implication, in gender discrimination lawsuits, the plaintiff might not prove malignant intent, but could show reckless use of categories in workplace evaluations. Managers who rely on category-based shortcuts are failing to individuate candidates for hiring and promotion. In providing expert testimony to this effect, I aimed to bring up-to-date science into the courtroom, but I had no idea that the testimony would reach all the way to the Supreme Court. Fortunately for me and for social cognition research, the justices found the argument to be so obvious (‘icing on the cake’) that it hardly required an expert witness (Fiske, Bersoff, Borgida, Deaux, & Heilman, 1991).

From the outset, the cognitive-miser model proved useful by (a) catalyzing new cognitive methods that might minimize experimenter bias and subjectivity (e.g. looking time), (b) generating falsifiable theory, (c) with mental process variables, mediators (e.g. attention) and (d) moderators (e.g. fit) that should specify conditions for obtaining one effect (shortcuts) or another (thoughtful judgments). As a result, the approach had real-world relevance. Nevertheless, the cognitive miser lacked motivation and context.

Second wave: Motivated tacticians’ thinking is for doing

Our field’s founders had considered social cognitive questions from a pragmatic, cognitive-miser viewpoint. For example, James (1890) described the ‘finite and practical self’, who must be ‘always unjust, always partial, always exclusive’ (pp. 959–60). He described the perceiver’s understanding as in the service of acting, which my review paraphrased as thinking is for doing (Fiske, 1992). Other early person-perception frameworks followed this pragmatic perspective (Asch, Bruner, Allport, Heider, Tajfel, Jones).

In the 1970s and 80s, the cognitive-miser view initially neglected the pragmatics of thinking, with a narrow focus on context-free cognitive process and outcome. But, toward the century’s end, the new field of social cognition began to recognize that social understanding serves social interaction (Fiske, 1992). Three patterns of findings were emerging: Perceivers adopt good-enough strategies for everyday purposes; they are not inevitably as error-prone as cognitive misers might seem. Perceivers construct meaning through concepts such as traits, stereotypes, and stories, going beyond the information given, in Bruner’s felicitous terms. Finally, perceivers’ thinking strategies depend on their goals: People are motivated tacticians—sometimes cognitive misers, but some times deeper thinkers—depending on their purpose in making sense of another person. Strategies depend on varying motives, such as self-enhancement or social interdependence, to determine when to make more or less effort.

Expert witnessing uncovered one illustrative motive neglected in stereotyping research: power. Peers perceiving peers had been the paradigm. But, many consequential decisions entail power-holders judging the less powerful (e.g. bosses; Fiske, 1993). Power should moderate stereotyping for several reasons. First, power-holders, because they control resources, need not individuate subordinates as much as vice versa. Attention focuses up the hierarchy. Second, power-holders may not want to overcome their stereotypes; powerful positions select for individuals focused on self more than others. Finally, power-holders are outnumbered by subordinates, so they cannot attend fully to each one. Subsequent experiments supported the power-as-control model (Dépret & Fiske, 1999; Goodwin, Gubin, Fiske, & Yzerbyt, 2000; Operario & Fiske, 2001; Stevens & Fiske, 2000): Power motives make perceivers vulnerable to stereo typing.

Motivated social cognition is not limited to how people think, superficially versus carefully. Motives also flavor what people think. For example, inter-dependence motivates people to think harder about another person, whom they need (Erber & Fiske, 1984), but may introduce bias, as when people hope for a longer-term relationship and observe through rose-colored glasses (Goodwin, Fiske, Rosen, & Rosenthal, 2002).

A case in point: Men and women are intimately interdependent, but men have more societal status. How do perceivers negotiate this complexity? Ambivalent Sexism (Glick & Fiske, 1996) provides one answer. Hostile sexism targets women who refuse intimate interdependence with men (career women, lesbians, feminists), viewing them as cold (but perhaps capable). Subjectively benevolent sexism—patronizing prejudice—views women in more traditional roles (secretary, housewife) as warm but incompetent. Sexism takes distinct forms, endorses different stereotypes, depending on interaction context, and motives inform this analysis.

Overall, the motivated-tactician view, in returning to earlier pragmatism (thinking is for doing), inspired new methods (e.g. scales such as the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory), encouraged replicability by specifying moderating motives (e.g. power), provided societal relevance (e.g. power’s role), and encouraged new theory (e.g. Ambivalent Sexism).

Twenty-first-century activated actors: Social brain and social mind

By the turn of this century, social cognition research had discovered hosts of motives to moderate thinking and doing. But hosts are unmanageable. A social-evolutionary approach, based on adaptation to group life, proposed a taxonomy to organize core social motives relevant to social interaction (Fiske, 2000). First is belonging, wanting human connection and identity; people need other people to survive and thrive. Getting along in the group cognitively requires shared reality (understanding) and predictable contingency (controlling). Getting along affectively depends on sufficient self-regard (self-enhancing) and sufficient other-regard (trusting). These motives capture those most-often invented by psychologists generally and social cognition researchers specifically.

Equipped with social motives, social cognition research expanded further to behavior, viewing the social perceiver as activated actor. Two of the most-often recruited mechanisms were cognition-behavior activation in the mind and a direct route to behavioral tendencies correlated with brain activation. Our work illustrates as follows.

The Stereotype Content Model (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, and Xu, 200...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Not your grandparents’ social cognition: A family letter about progress through crisis
• Part I Cognitive misers: The origins of social cognition
• Part II Second wave: Motivated tacticians’ thinking is for doing
• Part III Twenty-first-century activated actors: Social brain and social mind
• Part IV Inequality enablers: Social cognition and social relevance
• Index