Heider's Formulation of Social Perception and Attributional Processes

Abstract

It is argued that Heider's conception of the relationship between perceptual and attributional processes has not received sufficient attention. The distinction between the phenomenal description of perception and Heider's causal analysis of the perceptual process is presented. It is noted that Heider's attribution theory may best be viewed as a comprehensive formulation of the naive, implicit principles that underlie the perception of social objects and that his emphasis is on an underlying flow, a causal stream from the distal stimulus to the final percept, rather than only on subprocesses such as the phenomenology of the perceiver.

The Discovery of Common-Sense Psychology

“…Heider’s early encounter with epistemology left him with the conviction that the causal-representational theory of perception was viable. Indeed, as Schönpflug notes in this issue, Heider’s analysis of social perception presented 18 years later (Heider, 1944) is “just a change in application, not in paradigm.” That is, Heider views the perception of other persons as but a special case of perceiving inanimate objects, and consequently applies his causal theory of thing perception to person perception (see also Heider, 1958, Chapter 2; Malle, 2004; Weary, Rich, Harvey, & Ickes, 1980). Nevertheless, person perception is special in some respects.…”