Fritz Heider (19 February 1896 – 2 January 1988) was an American/Austrian social 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.

Biography

Heider was born in Vienna on February 19, 1896, but he grew up in Graz. During his childhood, Heider sustained a serious eye injury which later turned him quite serious and shy in his adolescence. Because of his injury, Heider avoided the draft during World War I.

With his father's encouragement, Heider enrolled to study architecture at the University of Graz.  After growing tired of studying architecture, Heider attempted to study law at Graz as well but eventually became tired of both subjects. Since he really liked to learn for its own sake, he struck a deal with his father and proceeded to audit courses at the university for four years. 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 including his work on Thing and Medium on the psychology of perception. Afterwards, he traveled to Berlin, where he attended lectures at the Psychology Institute. There, Heider's studies focused on the Gestalt psychology of 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 in science had an important influence on Kurt Lewin.

In 1930, at the age of 34, Heider was offered an opportunity to conduct research at the Clarke School for the Deaf 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 Smith College (Heider, 1983).

It was in Northampton that he met his wife Grace (née 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. The couple had three sons: Karl, John, and Stephan. His son Karl Heider went on to become an important contributor to visual anthropology and ethnographic film whereas his son John wrote the popular The Tao of Leadership.

In 1948, Heider was recruited to the University of Kansas, by social psychologist Roger Barker (Heider, 1983). He remained in Kansas for the remainder of his life. In 1983, Heider documented his personal, career developments and achievements in his autobiography The Life of a Psychologist: An Autobiography.

The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations pioneered attribution theory. 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 26,000 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.

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 effective 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).

Although he published little else, he kept voluminous notebooks which contained his reflections on psychology. These were subsequently edited in six volumes by Marijana Benesh-Weiner, a former student of Heider, who worked with Heider in organizing the collection for publication.(Heider & Benesh-Weiner, 1987a, 1987b, 1988, 1989a, 1989b, 1990).

The cognition–emotion linkage

Although Fritz Heider's notebooks do not contain a specific theory on emotions, his notes do contain evidence of his beliefs on a cognition-emotion link and a fundamental logic that underlies all experiences of emotional states. Heider also points out that emotions may influence or alter cognitive states among some people. Heider also offered many definitions of emotional states and key properties that characterized these states. The emotions which Heider had a particular interest in are those which are considered interpersonal such as: anger and vengeance, sorrow and pity, gratitude, love, envy and jealousy. Others include the work by Miles Hewstone published in 1989. and the review published in the Review of General Psychology in 2007.

Awards

  • 1987: Gold Medal for Scholarly Accomplishment in Psychological Science, American Psychological Foundation
  • 1981: Honorary doctorate, University of Graz
  • 1981: Admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • 1965: APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology, American Psychological Association
  • 1959: Kurt Lewin Award, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues

Key works

  • Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
  • Heider, F. (1983). The life of a psychologist: An autobiography. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.
  • Heider, F., and M. Benesh-Weiner. (1987-1990). Fritz Heider: The Notebooks: Volumes 1-6. Springer.

See also

  • Attribution theory
  • Balance theory

References

Sources

  • Department of Psychology, History, University of Kansas, https://web.archive.org/web/20140101132543/http://psych.ku.edu/about/history/1938-1948.shtml
  • Fiske, S.T., & Taylor, S.E. (1991). Social cognition (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
  • Adelbert Ames, Fritz Heider and the Ames Chair Demonstration