Fritz Heider: A Biographical Sketch

Summary

The history and development of Fritz Heider's career as a psychologist are reviewed from the period of his association with the Graz and Berlin schools in the 1920's through the years he spent working at Smith College and the University of Kansas. Heider's work has had a profound impact on contemporary work on interpersonal relations and attributional phenomena. Particular emphasis in the paper is given to the intellectual and nonintellectual influences which Heider considers to have had the most impact on his thinking about “naive” or “common sense” psychology. For example, the conception of balance described in his 1958 book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, is shown to derive from such diverse sources as his reactions to his friends' quarrels in the years immediately following World War I, his exposure to Wertheimer's principles of unit-formation during the years he studied gestalt psychology in Berlin, and his intense study of the propositions set forth in Spinoza's Ethics. The direct and indirect influences on Heider's work of other philosophers and psychologists—including Meinong, Koffka, Cassirer, and Lewin—are also considered.