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.

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.

The field of social cognitive neuroscience has captured the attention of many researchers during the past ten years. Much of the impetus for this new field came from the development of functional neuroimaging methods that made it possible to unobtrusively measure brain activation over time. Using these methods over the last 30 years has allowed psychologists to move from simple validation questions -- would flashing stimuli activate the visual cortex -- to those about the functional specialization of brain regions-- are there regions in the inferior temporal cortex dedicated to face processing-- to questions that, just a decade ago, would have been considered to be intractable at such a level of analysis.
These so-called "intractable" questions are the focus of the chapters in this book, which introduces social cognitive neuroscience research addressing questions of fundamental importance to social psychology: How do we understand and represent other people? How do we represent social groups? How do we regulate our emotions and socially undesirable responses? This book also presents innovative combinations of multiple methodologies, including behavioral experiments, computer modeling, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) experiments, Event-Related Potential (ERP) experiments, and brain lesion studies. It is divided into four sections. The first three sections present the latest research on, respectively, understanding and representing other people, representing social groups, and the interplay of cognition and emotion in social regulation. In the fourth section, contributors step back and consider a range of novel topics that have emerged in the context of social neuroscience research: understanding social exclusion as pain, deconstructing our moral intuitions, understanding cooperative exchanges with other agents, and the effect of aging on brain function and its implications for well-being. Taken together, these chapters provide a rich introduction to an exciting, rapidly developing and expanding field that promises a richer and deeper understanding of the social mind.