Fritz Heider

Introduction

Fritz Heider (February 18, 1896 – January 2, 1988) was an Austrian-American psychologist who gave social psychology its most durable set of questions. He wanted to know how ordinary people explain the behavior of the people around them — why friends fall out, why a stranger was rude, whether someone's success came from ability or luck. He called this enterprise "naive psychology" or "commonsense psychology," on the argument that before people are scientists they are already practitioners of causal explanation, and that the everyday version deserves to be studied rather than dismissed.

Heider built almost no experiments and founded no school in the usual sense. What he produced instead, across six decades, was a conceptual architecture — set out in the 1958 book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations — that others turned into research programs. Attribution theory, its derivatives, and its critics together account for a large share of what social psychology did for the thirty years after him.

Early Life and Education

Heider was born in Vienna, the younger of two sons in a wealthy family of Hungarian origin. His father was an architect and his mother an amateur actress. The family moved to Graz while he was very young, and he was taught by a tutor before entering the local primary school at nine. A childhood accident with a cap gun damaged one eye badly enough that he was later barred from military service in the First World War — a piece of luck that kept him studying while a generation of European psychology was scattered.

His education was unusually indirect, and he described the arrangement with some amusement in later interviews. He enrolled at the Technical University in Graz in 1914 to study architecture, disliked the teaching, and wanted instead to train as a painter. His father blocked that and proposed law; Heider enrolled at law school in Graz and promptly lost interest. The compromise his father funded is the odd detail of the story: four years of unrestricted study across whatever subjects he liked, after which he was to take up agriculture and raise pigs on the family's land.

He used the freedom well, sitting in on philosophy, psychology, premedical science, zoology and art history, and gravitating toward the Graz Institute of Philosophy. There he worked under Alexius Meinong, a philosopher of ontology and epistemology, and studied the psychology of emotion under Vittorio Benussi. His 1920 dissertation under Meinong took up the problem of perception — arguing that perceivers attribute what they directly sense to an object construed as its cause, and that this is why the perceptual world seems to be "out there" rather than in the mind. It was one of the earliest causal theories of perception, and it is the seed of everything he later said about attribution.

Academic and Professional Career

After the doctorate, Heider spent several years moving through Central Europe. He was commissioned by the Styrian provincial government to develop aptitude tests for apprentices, and from 1921 he studied at the Psychological Institute in Berlin, supporting himself by selling antique books and tutoring. Berlin in those years was the center of Gestalt psychology, and Heider sat at the feet of Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler and began a friendship with Kurt Lewin that lasted until Lewin's death.

In 1927 he took a post at the University of Hamburg as assistant to William Stern. Three years later he accepted an offer that reshaped his life: a research position at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, connected with Smith College, where Kurt Lewin's colleague Kurt Koffka ran a laboratory. Heider stayed seventeen years, working on problems of deafness and, increasingly, on how people construe one another. In December 1930 he married Grace Moore, a researcher at Clarke; they had three sons. Heider later credited her, in his autobiography, with an indispensable contribution to his thinking.

In 1947 he moved to the University of Kansas as a Guggenheim fellow, and Lawrence became his home for the rest of his life. He was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Oslo in 1960–61 and held visiting appointments at Stanford, Cornell and Duke. He formally retired in 1966 but continued working as an emeritus professor, writing memoirs and organizing the notebooks in which he had diagrammed his theories for decades. He died at his home in Lawrence on January 2, 1988.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Attribution

Heider's central move was to treat cause-seeking as the ordinary business of social life. In work begun in the 1940s and consolidated in 1958, he argued that behavior is typically read either as flowing from the person — traits, motives, effort, ability — or as compelled by the situation — task difficulty, luck, social pressure. He called these personal and impersonal (later writers: dispositional and situational) attributions, and he also insisted on a second distinction that is often lost in summaries: between intending an outcome and merely bringing it about, between trying and succeeding.

He also identified the perceptual asymmetry that makes the whole question interesting. Heider described behavior as a figure standing out against the ground of its context: another person's actions are vivid and available, while the circumstances that produced them are invisible to us because we were not there. Decades later Taylor and Fiske tested the idea directly by having observers watch a scripted conversation from different vantage points, and found that whoever a given observer could see clearly was rated as the one directing the conversation. The figure-ground intuition survived contact with a controlled experiment.

Two linked devices carried the argument further. The covariation principle says we attribute an outcome to whichever candidate cause is present when it occurs and absent when it does not. The discounting principle — later formalized by Kelley — says a cause is discounted when another sufficient cause is also present. Heider wrote all this as description of what people actually do, not as a normative ideal, and he was careful to note that attribution usually runs ahead of the evidence.

With Marianne Simmel he ran one of the few experiments of his career, and it became a landmark of a different field. In 1944 they showed participants a short animated film of geometric shapes moving around a box and asked them what was happening. Almost nobody described it as moving shapes; people narrated personalities, intentions, bullying and romance. The study is now treated as an early demonstration of the human tendency to attribute mind and agency — the origin point, in many accounts, of modern animacy research.

Balance theory

The other half of Heider's reputation rests on the P-O-X model, set out in 1946 and expanded in 1958. Take a person P, another person O, and some object or topic X. The relations among them are of two kinds: sentiment relations (liking) and unit relations (ownership, association, similarity). A configuration is balanced when the relations are consistent — you like someone who agrees with you about something — and unbalanced when they are not, and Heider proposed that imbalance generates pressure toward change. The scheme is almost absurdly simple and turned out to be remarkably generative, providing the scaffolding on which Leon Festinger and others built the more empirically tractable literature on cognitive consistency.

Major Publications

Heider, F. (1920). Doctoral dissertation on the problems of perception, University of Graz, under Alexius Meinong.
Heider, F. (1944). "Social perception and phenomenal causality." Psychological Review, 51, 358–374.
Heider, F., & Simmel, M. (1944). "An experimental study of apparent behavior." American Journal of Psychology, 57, 243–259.
Heider, F. (1946). "Attitudes and cognitive organization." Journal of Psychology, 21, 107–112.
Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley.
Heider, F. (1983). The Life of a Psychologist. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.
Benesh-Weiner, M. (Ed.). (1987–). Fritz Heider: The Notebooks (6 vols.). New York: Springer-Verlag.

Impact and Legacy

Heider received the Lewin Memorial Award in 1959 and the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1965. His 1958 book is among the most cited works in social psychology, and the vocabulary he introduced — actor and observer, dispositional and situational, perceived locus of causality — is now standard. A striking sign of the theory's reach is that Heider's notion of perceived locus of causality, developed for questions about another person's behavior, is what Edward Deci later picked up and turned into a theory of motivation. Weiner records that Heider himself resisted having attribution theory credited to him, arguing that too many people had contributed to it; his admirers thought this excessive modesty, and it also kept the framework open enough to stay useful.

Note too how slow the uptake was: the 1958 book attracted attention mainly from the mid-1960s, when Jones, Davis, Kelley and Weiner began turning its distinctions into testable models. Heider, nearing seventy, watched the field he had outlined become its own industry.

The criticisms are serious and worth stating plainly.

The "naive scientist" is not a good description of an actual person. Attribution theory has been attacked as mechanistic and rationalistic — it models people as though they sought causes systematically, when the evidence points to fast, careless, motivated judgment. Later writers replaced Heider's scientist with a "cognitive miser" or "motivated tactician," keeping his questions while abandoning his picture of the actor.

The universality of the pattern does not hold. Joan Miller's comparison of Hindu adults in India with Americans showed Indian adults favoring situational explanations and Americans favoring dispositional ones, with the gap absent in eight-year-olds and widening with age. That is bad news for any claim that dispositional bias is a property of human cognition generally — it looks like something individualistic cultures teach.

Some of the textbook findings downstream are smaller than advertised. Bertram Malle's 2006 review of actor-observer asymmetry found the effect far weaker and more conditional than summaries usually claim, holding mainly for negative and intentional behavior. That does not overturn the field Heider started, but it should temper readings of him that treat the biases as fixed laws.

Heider tested little of it himself. His genius was taxonomic, and by temperament he preferred conceptual clarity to experiment. That is precisely why his ideas could be taken up by others — and why so many of the claims attributed to him were actually demonstrated, or failed to be, by people who were not him.

Finally, balance theory is the part of his output that has aged least well. Its elegance was its weakness: because almost any configuration can be counted as balanced under some reading, it made fewer clean predictions than Festinger's dissonance framework, and the latter displaced it.

Learn More

Attribution Theory, the research program Heider's distinctions launched
Harold Kelley, who turned Heider's covariation principle into a testable model
Leon Festinger, whose dissonance theory eclipsed Heider's balance model
Max Wertheimer, whose Gestalt psychology shaped Heider's thinking in Berlin
Kurt Lewin, his lifelong friend and the other great émigré influence on American social psychology

References

Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. Wiley.