Fritz Heider (19 February 1896 – 2 January 1988)[1] was an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school.
This book presents a wide-range analysis of the conceptual framework and the psychological processes that influence human social perception (Malle, 2008).
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.
There, Heider's studies focused on the Gestalt psychology of Wolfgang Koehler, Max Wertheimer and Kurt Lewin.
[citation needed] 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.
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).
In 1958, at the University of Kansas, Heider published his most famous work, which remains his most significant contribution to the field of social psychology.
In his book, Heider presented a wide-ranging analysis of the conceptual framework and the psychological processes that undergird human 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).
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.
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".
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).
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.
[6] Heider primarily argued that in cases where one's fundamental logic appears to be contradicted by something else, a much fuller analysis of the particular situation must take place.
[6] Heider mentions that the need for one to maintain balanced states can affect the experience of gratitude as well as other emotions.
In addition to the work mentioned above, Heider explains how there seems to be some cognitive schema that has both a general and pervasive influence which led to the simplification of perception.