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This article reviews some of the central ideas in Heider’s (1958) book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations: common-sense psychology, personal causality, causal attribution, and the social perception of mental states. Relying on Heider’s own words to introduce these topics, the review shows that post-Heiderian attribution research overlooked and misunderstood several of Heider’s contributions. For example, he has been falsely portrayed as postulating a person-situation dichotomy as the core of people’s understanding of behavior; and his analysis of dispositions as primarily mental states has been mistaken for one of dispositions as stable traits. Heider’s original ideas are, however, firmly connected to cognitive science research on the folk theory of mind and provide a foundation for recent social-psychological work on inferences of other people’s mental states.

Fritz Heider’s thinking has influenced several generations of social psychologists, primarily through his work on social perception and attribution processes. The culmination of his theorizing appeared in1958 in The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, a book that took 15 years to complete and whose chapters had already been mimeographed and circulated since the late 1940s among the, at that time, small circle of social psychologists. In his book, Heider presented a wide-ranging analysis of the conceptual framework and the psychological processes that undergird human social perception. This article reviews some of Heider’s central claims about social perception and attribution, reflects on the reception and often misunderstanding of these claims in the social psychological literature, and describes recent empirical research that supports and expands on Heider’s hypotheses.

The Introduction section to Heider’s 1958) book identified two interrelated goals: First, Heider wanted to develop a scientific theory of interpersonal behavior, grounded in a “conceptual network suitable to some of the problems in this field” (p. 4). This scientific theory, he believed, could benefit a great deal from an understanding of how people themselves conceptualize human behavior, for “the ordinary person has a great and profound...