Fritz Heider

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Fritz Heider (February 19, 1896 � January 2, 1988)[1] was an Austrian psychologist
whose work was related to the Gestalt school. In 1958 he published The Psychology
of Interpersonal Relations, which expanded upon his creations of balance theory and
attribution theory. This book presents a wide-range analysis of the conceptual
framework and the psychological processes that influence human social perception
(Malle,2008). It had taken 15 years to complete; before it was completed it had
already circulated through a small group of social psychologists.

Contents [hide]
1 Biography
2 See also
3 References
4 Sources
5 External links
Biography[edit]
Heider was born in Vienna, Austria in 1896. His approach to higher education was
rather casual, and he wandered freely throughout Europe studying and traveling as
he pleased for many years. His father was an architect, which influenced him
initially to study architecture at the University of Graz; he had first wanted to
become a painter. He tried his hand at studying law, but didn't quite like it
either.[2] Since he really liked to learn, he therefore went to audit courses at
the university.[2] He eventually became more interested in psychology and
philosophy.[2] At the age of 24 he received a Ph.D. from the University of Graz,
for his innovative study of the causal structure of perception included the work on
'Thing and Medium' a work on the psychology of perception, and traveled to Berlin,
where he worked at the Psychology Institute under Wolfgang Koehler, Max Wertheimer
and Kurt Lewin.

In 1927 he accepted a position at the University of Hamburg, whose faculty included

the psychologist William Stern and Ernst Cassirer, the philosopher whose thinking
on the role of theory on science had an important influence on Kurt Lewin.

In 1930, Heider was offered an opportunity to conduct research at the Clarke School
for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, which was associated with Smith
College, also in Northampton. This prospect was particularly attractive to him
because Kurt Koffka, one of the founders of the Gestalt school of psychology, held
a position at nearby Smith College (Heider, 1983).

It was in Northampton that he met his wife Grace (n�e Moore). Grace was one of the
first people Heider met in the United States. As an assistant to Koffka, she helped
Heider find an apartment in Northampton and introduced him to the environs (Heider,
1983). They were married in 1930, and the marriage lasted for more than 50 years,
producing three sons: Karl, John, and Stephan. Karl Heider went on to become an
important contributor to visual anthropology and ethnographic film. John Heider
wrote the popular "The Tao of Leadership."

Heider published two important articles in 1944 that pioneered the concepts of
social perception and causal attribution: "Social perception and phenomenal
causality," and, with co-author Marianne Simmel, "An experimental study of apparent
behavior." Subsequently, Heider would publish little for the next 14 years.

In 1948, Heider was recruited to the University of Kansas, by social psychologist

Roger Barker (Heider, 1983). A decade later, Heider published his most famous work,
which remains his most significant contribution to the field of social
psychology.The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (1958) was written in
collaboration with the uncredited Beatrice Wright, a founder of rehabilitiation
psychology. Wright was available to collaborate because the University of Kansas's
nepotism rules prohibited her from a position at the University (her husband, Erik
Wright, was a professor), and the Ford Foundation gave Heider funds and assistance
to complete the project. (Wright is credited only in the Foreword; she later went
on to become an endowed professor of psychology at the University of Kansas). In
his book, Heider presented a wide-ranging analysis of the conceptual framework and
the psychological processes that undergird human social perception.[3]

The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations pioneered the modern field of social

cognition. A giant of social psychology, Heider had few students, but his book on
social perception had many readers, and its impact continues into the 21st Century,
having been cited over 13,000 times. Heider introduced two theories that correspond
to his two articles from 1944: attribution theory and cognitive balance. The
Psychology of Interpersonal Relations illuminates a sophisticated approach toward
naive or common-sense psychology.[4]

In The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, Heider argued that social perception

follows many of the same rules of physical object perception, and that the
organization found in object perception is also found in social perception. Because
biases in object perception sometimes lead to errors (e.g., optical illusions), one
might expect to find that biases in social perception likewise lead to errors
(e.g., underestimating the role social factors and overestimating the effect of
personality and attitudes on behavior).

Heider also argued that perceptual organization follows the rule of psychological
balance. Although tedious to spell out in completeness, the idea is that positive
and negative sentiments need to be represented in ways that minimize ambivalence
and maximize a simple, straightforward affective representation of the person. He
writes "To conceive of a person as having positive and negative traits requires a
more sophisticated view; it requires a differentiation of the representation of the
person into subparts that are of unlike value (1958, p. 182)."

But the most influential idea in The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations is the
notion of how people see the causes of behavior, and the explanations they make for
it�what Heider called "attributions".

Attribution theory (as one part of the larger and more complex Heiderian account of
social perception) describes how people come to explain (make attributions about)
the behavior of others and themselves. Behavior is attributed to a disposition
(e.g., personality traits, motives, attitudes), or behavior can be attributed to
situations (e.g., external pressures, social norms, peer pressure, accidents of the
environment, acts of God, random chance, etc.) Heider first made the argument that
people tend to overweight internal, dispositional causes over external causes�this
later became known as the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977) or
correspondence bias (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Jones, 1979, 1990).

In 1983, Heider documented his personal, career developments and achievements in

his autobiography The Life of a Psychologist: An Autobiography.[4] He received many
honors, including the American Psychological Association (APA) Distinguished
Contribution Award, the Gold Medal for Scholarly Accomplishment in Psychological
Science presented by the American Psychological Foundation, and election to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[4] Heider died at his home in Lawrence,
Kansas, on 2 January 1988 at the age of 91. His intellectual legacy still lives on.
His wife of 57 years, Grace, died in 1995. His son John died in 2010.[4]

See also[edit]
Attribution theory
Balance theory
References[edit]
Jump up ^ American Psychologist., "Fritz Heider (1896 - 1988)". American
Psychological Association, 1989, p. 570.
^ Jump up to: a b c Ickes, W.; Harvey, J.H. (1978). "Fritz Heider: A Biographical
Sketch". The Journal of Psychology 98: 159�170. doi:10.1080/00223980.1978.9915957.
Jump up ^ Malle, Bertham (January 2008). "Fritz Heider's Legacy: Celebrated
Insights, Many of Them Misunderstood". American Psychologist 39 (3): 1�2.
doi:10.1027/1864-9335.39.3.163. Retrieved 4 December 2012.
^ Jump up to: a b c d Harvey, John H. (March 1989). "Fritz Heider (1896-1988)"
(PDF). American Psychologist 44 (3): 570�571.