Social Neuroscience Talk: Susan Fiske

Earlier in the academic year, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Princeton’s Susan Fiske titled “Varieties of (De)Humanizing: Divided by Status and Competition.”  Dr. Fiske focused primarily upon the thesis that social cognition and dehumanization, or the tendency of people to view members of outgroups as less-than-human, varies along predictable dimensions. 

These dimensions, warmth and competence, may be familiar from class.  Warmth represents how we view the social intent of the agent in question—whether they mean us good or ill—and competence represents how able the targeted person is capable of bringing about what they intend.  Dr. Fiske explained how high/low degrees of warmth and competence could be represented in a 2x2 grid, the quadrants of which correspond to certain social emotions.  These are pride (high warmth/high competence), corresponding to ingroup members; envy (low warmth/high competence); pity (high warmth/low competence); and disgust (low warmth/low competence), reserved for social outgroups like the homeless and drug addicts.

What was particularly fascinating was Dr. Fiske’s explanation of how changing the context of a person assessment changes how an experimental subject perceives that person neurologically, primarily in the medial prefrontal cortex.  For example, if researchers explained that an apparent drug addict were given a story in which they were attempting to go to rehab or something similar, the subject’s evaluation of that person would increase in warmth.  Moreover, if people with injuries (in the “pity” category) were explained to have been responsible for their injury, sympathy for that person diminished.  And amusingly, people seem to exhibit schadenfreude for people in the envy category (bankers, lawyers, etc.): they seem to enjoy the idea of bad things happening to them.

The talk was, in sum, a thoroughly engrossing experience and a testament to the explanatory power of social neuroscience to enthrall.