Fritz Heider's Legacy. Celebrated Insights, Many of Them Misunderstood

B.F. Malle: Heiders LegacySocial Psychology 2008; Vol. 39(3):163173 2008 Hogrefe & Huber Publishers

Fritz Heiders LegacyCelebrated Insights, Many of ThemMisunderstood

Bertram F. Malle

University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

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

Keywords: attribution, explanation, trait inference, actor-observer asymmetry, intentionality, causality, common sense, social perception

Fritz Heiders thinking has influenced several generationsof social psychologists, primarily through his work on so-cial perception and attribution processes. The culminationof his theorizing appeared in1958 in The Psychology of In-terpersonal Relations, a book that took 15 years to com-plete and whose chapters had already been mimeographedand circulated since the late 1940s among the, at that time,small circle of social psychologists. In his book, Heiderpresented a wide-ranging analysis of the conceptual frame-work and the psychological processes that undergird hu-man social perception. This article reviews some of Hei-ders central claims about social perception and attribution,reflects on the reception and often misunderstanding ofthese claims in the social psychological literature, and de-scribes recent empirical research that supports and expandson Heiders hypotheses.

Common-Sense Psychology asFoundation and Phenomenon

The Introduction section to Heiders 1958 book identifiedtwo interrelated goals: First, Heider wanted to develop ascientific theory of interpersonal behavior, grounded in aconceptual network suitable to some of the problems inthis field (p. 4). This scientific theory, he believed, couldbenefit a great deal from an understanding of how peoplethemselves conceptualize human behavior, for the ordi-nary person has a great and profound understanding of him-self and of other people (p. 2). Second, Heider wanted toreconstruct that very common-sense psychology, the net-work of interrelated concepts that ordinary people use to

describe, explain, and predict interpersonal behavior. Thisreconstruction would, in turn, lead to a scientific theory ofsocial perception a theory of how people think about so-cial behavior.

In Heiders project, common-sense psychology, thus,has two functions: It serves as a source of truths about ac-tual social behavior (prescientific knowledge that shouldinform science), and it is an object of study in its own right,because it underpins social perception and interpersonalbehavior.

Heiders first goal, to directly shape social psychologysscientific language and approach through a considerationof common-sense psychology, has seen limited success.Trying to avoid offering mere bubba psychology (Mc-Guire, 1997) and, therefore, aiming at nonobviousness(Ross & Nisbett, 1991), the field has focused more on theflaws in peoples reasoning (e.g., Nisbett & Ross, 1980)than on the effectiveness of their framework of social per-ception (Krueger & Funder, 2004). Unfavorable compari-sons to normative (often statistical) models under tightlyconstrained laboratory conditions (e.g., McArthur, 1972;Jones & Harris, 1967) have been more common than genu-inely Heiderian studies of the specific concepts and pro-cesses by which people perceive others in natural interac-tions. Heiders image of the person as a self-determinedagent is echoed by a small number of theories in the field(e.g., Bandura, 2006; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975; Deci & Ry-an, 1987), but much of social psychology has moved intothe opposite direction, increasingly emphasizing uncon-scious processes and brain mechanisms as the most impor-tant determinants of human behavior (e.g., Bargh, 2005;Greenwald, 1992; Wegner, 2002).

Heiders second goal to study peoples perception,reasoning about, and evaluation of social behavior is as

DOI 10.1027/1864-9335.39.3.163 2008 Hogrefe & Huber Publishers Social Psychology 2008; Vol. 39(3):163173

relevant today as it was 50 years ago. Like Lewin andAsch before him, Heider recognized that social psychol-ogy must chart out peoples subjective perceptions andnaive-psychological assumptions, because whetherright or wrong they are critical factors in guiding socialinteraction. Though Heider never formulated a theory ofsocial perception in a systematic way, his thinking in thisdomain has had a powerful and lasting impact on socialpsychology.

Heiders specific focus was to study the ordinary per-sons conceptual framework, whereas much of socialpsychology since has emphasized mechanisms, such asjudgmental heuristics, schemas, and implicit processing.Other fields have taken up more clearly Heiders interestin peoples fundamental concepts of mind and action. To-day, the importance of common-sense psychology typ-ically labeled folk psychology or theory of mind is wide-ly accepted and discussed within developmental psychol-ogy, cognitive neuroscience, and primatology (e.g.,Gallagher & Frith, 2003; Povinelli, 1996; Wellman &Woolley, 1990). The idea that humans invariably per-ceive other humans as having mental states that guidetheir intentional actions has fostered engaging discus-sions in philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence(e.g., Carruthers & Smith, 1996; Elio, 2002; Givn,2005). In addition, research on autism and schizophreniahas benefited from considering the hypothesis that cer-tain aspects of the folk theory of mind are lacking in au-tistic and schizophrenic individuals, which might partial-ly account for their difficulties in interpersonal behavior(e.g., Baron-Cohen, 2000; Langdon, 2005).

Until recently, social psychology had not embracedthis view that human social cognition is best described interms of its fundamental conceptual assumptions, as afolk theory of intentional agency and other minds. Morecommonly, social cognition has been characterized as apacket of information processing systems, schemas, andheuristics (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Kunda, 1999). Un-doubtedly, these systems support the processing of socialevents, but as generic systems, they fail to identify whatis unique about social cognition something that thefolk-theory approach readily identifies. There are indica-tions, however, that theory of mind and folk psychologyresearch is beginning to find its way (back) into socialpsychology. This trend is reflected both in empiricalwork (e.g., Ames, 2004; Boonzaier, McClure, & Sutton,2005; Levi & Haslam, 2005; Malle, Knobe, OLaughlin,Pearce, & Nelson, 2000; Malle, Knobe & Nelson, 2007;Reeder, Vonk, Ronk, Ham, & Lawrence, 2004), reviewarticles (e.g., Hilton, 2007; Saxe, Carey, & Kanwisher,2004; Uleman, Adil Saribay, & Gonzalez, 2008), editedvolumes (Malle, Moses, & Baldwin, 2001; Malle &Hodges, 2005), and entries in textbooks (Gilovich, Kelt-ner, & Nisbett, 2006; Moskowitz, 2004).

I will now briefly review what post-Heiderian researchhas uncovered about the fundamental common-sense con-cepts of mind and action.

What Is Theory of Mind?

Humans perceive people, and interactions among them,through a conceptual framework that characterizes behav-ior as fundamentally linked with mental states. This frame-work, variously called nave, lay, common-sense, or folkpsychology, and most frequently theory of mind, consistsof (a) systems that filter, group, and integrate certain stim-ulus inputs into core concepts or categories such as agent,intention, belief, and reason; and (b) assumptions aboutthese categories and their relations (Malle, 2005). For ex-ample, objects that are self-propelled and behave contin-gently are classified into the category agent (Johnson,2000; Premack, 1990); object-directed movements of suchagents are classified into the category intentional action(Woodward, Sommerville, & Guajardo, 2001); and theconcept of intentional action is defined in terms of the men-tal state concepts belief, desire, and intention (Kashima,McIntyre, & Clifford, 1998; Malle & Knobe, 1997a).

Even though this framework is often labeled a theory,there has been considerable debate over the adequacy ofthis term (Carruthers & Smith, 1996). For some research-ers, the analogy to scientific theories was quite literal (Fla-vell, 1999; Gopnik & Wellman, 1992); for others, such aliteral interpretation left too many important processes outof the picture (e.g., simulation or empathy; Goldman, 1989;Gordon, 1986; Harris, 1992). The term theory of mind hasbecome so common in the field, however, that a radicalchange of terminology may be unwise. Fortunately, thisterm no longer comes with an automatic commitment tointerpret folk psychology as strictly theory-like (Malle &Hodges, 2005). Increasingly, theory of mind and its cog-nate terms refer both to a conceptual framework and to awide variety of psychological processes that rely on thisframework such as action parsing, simulation, explicitmental state inference, and explanation. When precision(rather than brevity) is desired, one should, therefore, dif-ferentiate between the folk-conceptual framework of mindand behavior and the social-cognitive processes that it sup-ports (Malle, 2008).

With the clarification of what theory of mind consistsof, research into its workings can also be protected fromthe bad reputation that the terms nave, common-sense, orfolk psychology have among many social psychologists(Epstein, 1997). Social psychologists typically group underthese terms a wide variety of beliefs, proverbs, and folktales that people might endorse in a given culture at a cer-tain point in history, many of which can be easily shown tobe incorrect. However, this is not what cognitive scientistshave in mind when they speak of a theory of mind. Peoplestheory of mind does not comprise folk tales or communitybeliefs, nor proverbs or platitudes; it consists of a networkof fundamental concepts that resemble Kantian categories that is, concepts without which social cognition wouldnot be possible (Malle, 2005).

Some psychologists (e.g., Smedslund, 1997, this issue),

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linguists (e.g., Wierzbicka, 1996), and numerous philoso-phers (e.g., Christensen & Turner, 1993; Greenwood, 1991)have attempted to identify these fundamental conceptsthrough linguistic and conceptual analysis. By contrast, mosttheory-of-mind researchers have adopted a more bottom-upapproach, trying to reconstruct childrens and adults concep-tual assumptions from their cognitive and behavioral re-sponses in the laboratory and in everyday life. These differingapproaches, however, agree on what lies at the heart of thisconceptual framework: the notions of agent, intentionality,and mental state categories such as belief and desire. Heideralready anticipated most of these concepts, as discussed next.

The Importance of Intentionality(Personal Causality)

For Heider, one of the major differences between personperception and object perception was that people apply twovery different conceptual models to the perception and ex-planation of human behavior (Heider, 1958, chap. 4). Thefirst is the model of impersonal causality, which is appliedto unintentional human behaviors (e.g., yawning or feelingsad) as well as to physical events (e.g., leaves falling orwaves splashing). The second is the model of what Heidertermed personal causality, which is invoked whenever ahuman agent performs an intentional action (e.g., turningpages or phoning a friend). Personal causality, Heiderwrote, refers to instances in which p causes x intentional-ly. That is to say, the action is purposive (Heider, 1958,p. 100).

Heider thus identified what would later be recognized asa central element in the folk theory of mind: the concept ofintentional action. Surprisingly, however, this concept fad-ed in subsequent attribution research. Jones and Daviss(1965) influential paper From Acts to Dispositions start-ed the analysis with Heider and seemed to take lay judg-ments of intentionality into account, but after the first twopages the focus shifted entirely to a theory of correspon-dent trait inferences. Attributions of intention were merelya precondition for inferences concerning those underlyingstable characteristics toward which the perceiver presses inattaching significance to action (p. 222). These trait infer-ences were presumed to be what people cared most aboutin person perception (Shaver, 1975).

Later models of correspondent inference were also en-tirely focused on traits and set aside the role of intention-ality in the interpretation and causal explanation of behav-ior (e.g., Gilbert, 1989; Trope, 1986). For example, in Gil-berts two-stage model of dispositional attribution, theperceiver goes through an early process of action identi-fication (what is the other person doing?) and a later stageof attributional processeswhere the perceiver does ordoes not infer a disposition. The fundamental distinctionbetween peoples causal model of intentional action and

their model of unintentional behavior was lost; not becauseit was denied but because the scientists models no longermentioned.

Kelley (1967) did not offer a theory of trait inference buta model of causal attribution. His declared goal was tohighlight some of the central ideas contained in Heiderstheory (Kelley, 1967, p. 192). However, the crucial dis-tinction Heider made between intentional and unintention-al behavior vanished in Kelleys model. In all of attribution,the choice is between external attribution and internal[. . .] attribution (Kelley, 1967, p. 194), and that choice isbased on computations of cause-effect covariations. Eventhough this process was assumed to apply equally to phys-ical, unintentional, and intentional events, in reality all ofKelleys examples referred to unintentional events: Ef-fects such as experiences, sensations, or responses(p. 196), impressions (p. 197), as well as arousal states andevaluative reactions (pp. 231232). In fact, as argued inKnobe and Malle (2002), a covariation model cannot ac-count for how people explain intentional action (see alsoMalle, 2004; Malle, Knobe, OLaughlin, Pearce, & Nelson,2000). Thus, although textbook entries and reviews of at-tribution research consistently laud Heider as the father ofattribution work, apparently the fathers words were notheeded: Heiders notion of personal/intentional causalitywas left out of the dominant theories of causal attribution.Some researchers pointed out this limitation (e.g., Buss,1978; Locke & Pennington, 1982), but the mainstreamtreatment of attribution remained unaffected.

Recent Research on Intentionality

Fifty years later, what do we know about the folk conceptof intentionality? We know now that the distinction be-tween agents and the rest of the world is one of the earliestsocial-cognitive distinctions that infants make. At thisstage of development, agents are conceptualized as self-propelled entities (Premack, 1990) that act contingently onthe childs own actions (Johnson, 2000). Because these fea-tures vary systematically with intentional actions, they con-stitute the earliest concept of intentionality. Still a conceptabout a class of behavior, it already captures an agentsdirectedness toward goals toward objects or towardevents that succeed characteristic behaviors. By 1214months of age, children engage in simple forms of jointattention with a caregiver, acts of coordinated engagementwith both an object and another perceiver of that object.Children also consult adults faces and bodily reactions todecide whether they themselves should approach or avoidcertain objects. This social referencing reveals their appre-ciation of another persons affective evaluation. Moreover,coordination of their own and the other persons affect in-creasingly refines childrens capacity for genuine joint at-tention (Hobson, 2005). Two additional processes jointlyopen the door to a more explicit understanding of minds as

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distinct from behavior: imitation and increasing awarenessof ones own mental states. As children expand their ownrepertoire of acting intentionally (and skillfully) in theworld, they almost obsessively imitate others behaviors.As they also experience more fully the affective and moti-vational states associated with their own actions (Russell,1996), they learn to associate these types of experienceswith other peoples observed actions as well. Relying onwhat Meltzoff and Brooks (2001) called the Like me as-sumption, children reason that another person who per-forms a particular action must have the same experiencesthat they themselves have when they so act. In this way.behavioral configurations become indicators of mentalstates. However, situations in which children act and feelthe same way as adults would not suffice to teach them thedistinctness of mind from behavior; children also have toexperience the opposite situations in which they clashwith another persons evaluation or desire. Seeing how re-sponses can differ with respect to the same object or eventinvites the recognition of subjective mental states (Malle,2002). Parents who endure their childrens terrible twoswitness the emergence of the mental concept of desire,which is also the first mentalistic category that is expressedin language (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995).

With increasing age, the concept of intentional actionbecomes more tightly connected to specific mental states,and children begin to integrate the interplay of beliefs, de-sires, and intentions within the concept of intentional action(Astington, 2001). Eventually the adult concept of inten-tionality emerges, which requires five conditions to be met(Malle & Knobe, 1997a): An action is considered inten-tional when the agent had a desire for an outcome, a beliefthat the action would lead to that outcome, an intention toperform the action, the skill to perform the action, andawareness of fulfilling that intention while performing theaction. Although actions are frequently recognized rapidlyand configurally by what they look like in a given context,in situations of doubt or dispute (most notably in the court-room), people explicitly consider these conditions to deter-mine whether a given behavior was indeed intentional(Malle & Nelson, 2003).

The sophistication needed to fully master the concept ofintentionality is quite remarkable. For example, the con-cepts of intention, desire, and goal are often used inter-changeably in the psychological literature, but ordinarypeople clearly differentiate between them (Heider, 1958;Malle & Knobe, 2001). At least three characteristics differ-entiate the folk concepts of intention and desire. First, in-tentions represent the intenders own action (I intend toA, where A is an action), whereas desires can representanything (I want O, where O can be an object or state ofaffairs, including another persons actions or experiences).Second, intentions are the output of practical reasoning,whereas desires are typically the input to such reasoning(I intend to A because I want O). Third, intentions comewith a characteristic commitment to perform the intendedaction whereas desires do not. Children before the age of 6

or 7 appear to hold a mixed desire/intention concept that isclosely tied to action (Astington, 2001), but after this agethey reliably distinguish desire from intention, even whenboth are removed from action (Schult, 2002). Perugini andBagozzi (2004) showed that attitude theory, which has pre-viously ignored the intention-desire differentiation, gainspredictive power when this distinction is made. This is oneof the cases in which Heiders vision came true that anexploration of common-sense concepts actually benefitspsychological theory and research.

Intentionality also plays a significant role in judgmentsof responsibility, blame, and praise. It has long been known(and was pointed out by Heider) that a behavior is blamedor praised more strongly if it is intentional rather than un-intentional. Interestingly, a recent flurry of research has ex-amined the hypothesis that the reverse relation may alsohold that is, that early praise or blame for an ambiguousbehavior influences peoples judgments of intentionality ofthat behavior (see Sousa, 2006, leading off a special issueon the topic). Initial, surprising findings suggesting thatthere is indeed such a reverse relationship are still hotlydebated. However, if true, the hypothesis at stake wouldhave important implications for the legal process, becauseit would cast doubt on a jurys capability to assess a defen-dants intent before assigning blame and guilt, as their feel-ings of blame for the objectionable behavior would alreadybias them toward considering the behavior intentional.Both psychologists and a new generation of experimentalphilosophers (Knobe & Nichols, 2008) are now workingside by side to solve both the conceptual and empirical puz-zles of this important phenomenon. Heider, himself bothphilosopher and psychologist, would have appreciated theinterdisciplinary character of this research.

Person-Situation orPersonal-Impersonal?

Meanwhile, what happened to Heiders emphasis on inten-tionality in causal attribution work after Kelley (1967)?Sadly, instead of returning to Heiders personal-impersonalcausality distinction, researchers (unwittingly) replaced itwith Kelleys simpler distinction between personal (or dis-positional or internal) causes and situational (external)causes. Part of this replacement may have stemmed fromthe projection of a scientific model of human behavior ontothe mind of the ordinary person. This scientific model, orig-inating in behaviorism, treated human behavior as an effectof situational reinforcers and (for some theorists) drivesand needs. No room was left for choice and intentionalagency. Influential social psychologist Kurt Lewin elabo-rated on this model but still summarized human behavioras a function of the person and the situation (Lewin,1936, p. 12). Influenced by these scientific models, attribu-tion researchers hypothesized that ordinary people similar-



ly conceptualize human behavior as fundamentally a resultof person causes and situation causes. As Kelly and Thibaut(1978) put it: The man in the street and the scientist sharethe same general approach to the interpretation of behavior.Both assume that B = f (P, E) (p. 214). At the time, theempirical data were not available to either confirm or dis-confirm this hypothesis but one thing is clear what Heidermeant by the personal-impersonal distinction was not a di-vision into person and situation causes.

Heider himself may have contributed to this deep mis-understanding (Malle & Ickes, 2000). His unusual choiceof words (personal vs. impersonal) when marking the in-tentionality distinction may have distracted his readers.Moreover, one can find passages in the 1958 book in whichHeider, in fact, describes a simple person-environment dis-tinction (p. 56, p. 82). However, in elaborating on this dis-tinction (pp. 8387), Heider made clear that it was notmeant to capture the entire naive psychology of action.Rather, he limited this dichotomy to the enabling forces thatallowed the person to successfully achieve a certain actionoutcome (e.g., passing a test, reaching the other side of theriver). In his broader analysis of the naive psychology ofaction, can and trying [are] the two necessary and suf-ficient conditions of purposive action (p. 123). Thus, anaction outcome is achieved when the person tries to andcan bring about the outcome. It is only for the can forcesthat Heider applied the distinction between person factors(ability) and environmental factors (task difficulty, luck).Heider admitted that one could group trying with abilitiesin one, big person-category and then portray the wholemodel as a two-valued person-environment system. How-ever, he did not believe that people think of action that way:Whether a person tries to do something and whether hehas the requisite abilities to accomplish it are so significant-ly different in the affairs of everyday life that naive psy-chology has demarcated those factors (p. 82). This demar-cation exists because trying reflects personal causality (theintentional aspects of action) whereas can reflects enablingconditions of action (p. 109), which fall under impersonalcausality. Thus, enabling factors such as ability and taskdifficulty can be grouped into internal and external, but per-sonal causality remains a solid category on its own.

One can put this important separation in terms of differ-ent explanatory questions (Malle et al., 2000; McClure &Hilton, 1998): If we wonder how it was possible that anaction did or did not succeed (the can aspect), the answerwill lie in various enabling or hindering factors (e.g., abil-ity, effort, task difficulty). If we wonder why the person istrying to perform the action, the answer lies in the reasonsbehind the intention (p. 111; see also pp. 125129). Notethat the why question can be posed even when the actionfailed because it asks for the motives of the trying, not forthe success conditions of the action.

In an interview with Bill Ickes (1976, p. 14), Heider ex-plicitly distinguished between these two types of question:the attribution of outcomes to enabling factors and the at-tribution of intentional actions to the actors motives (i.e.,

reasons for acting). Heider had developed the core of amodel of outcome attribution and noted that Weiners workdelivered a successful completion of this model (e.g., Wei-ner, Frieze, Kukla, Reed, Rest, & Rosenbaum, 1972). How-ever, Heider never developed a model of the reason expla-nations of intentional action, nor did he feel that reasonexplanations had been adequately treated by contemporaryattribution work (Ickes, 1976, p. 14). More recent work thatattempts to correct this situation is described next.

Recent Research on BehaviorExplanations (Causal Attributions)

The term attribution is used in multiple contexts and withmultiple meanings, sometimes referring to trait inferences,sometimes to responsibility judgments; but the most com-mon meaning is the one labeled causal attribution, captur-ing folk explanations of behavior. Kelleys (1967) covaria-tion theory of attribution and the distinction between inter-nal and external causes has been a mainstay in psychologytextbooks and can be considered the standard model ofcausal attribution. However, Kellys model applies only toa small subset of the psychological phenomena that ordi-nary people explain, namely, repeatedly occurring uninten-tional behaviors or experiences (Malle, 2004). Both Heider(1958) and Jones and Davis (1965) used the term reasonsto single out a unique mode of explanation that people ap-ply to intentional behaviors, but as mentioned above, thisinsight was lost early when the person-situation (internal-external) distinction took hold as the theoretical core ofcausal attribution research.

Several scholars called for a shift from the internal-ex-ternal model to one that takes into account the unique na-ture of reason explanations (Buss, 1978; Locke & Penning-ton, 1982; White, 1991). Similarly, a growing literature ongoal explanations (e.g., Lalljee & Abelson, 1983; Read,1987; see McClure, 2002) called the standard model intoquestion. None of these attempts, however, succeeded inaltering the mainstream theoretical assumptions.

Stubbornly, my colleagues and I have developed an al-ternative model of attribution that we call the folk-concep-tual theory of explanation (Malle, 1999, 2004; Malle et al.,2000; OLaughlin & Malle, 2002). Its development wasbased on the assumption that natural language is a morevalid indicator of how behavior explanations work than aretheoretically constrained (internal-external) rating scales.Building on previous critiques of attribution theory, themodel specifies the core folk concepts that underpin peo-ples behavior explanations and describes the multiplemodes and types of explanation that people spontaneouslyuse in natural settings.

The principal concept in folk behavior explanations is, asHeider had emphasized, intentionality that is, peoples dis-tinction between unintentional and intentional behavior



(Malle, 1999). Events perceived to be unintentional are ex-plained by causes that mechanically brought about the event;those perceived to be intentional are typically explained bythe agents reasons for acting (Davidson, 1963; Donellan,1967). Although people also regard reasons as causes of in-tentions and actions, they see them as operating very differ-ently from other causes. Specifically, reason explanations citethe (presumed) contents of the agents mental states (primar-ily beliefs and desires) in light of which, and on the groundsof which, the agent formed an intention to act. Providing areason is a form of perspective taking because the explainertries to identify what the agent considered and weighed whendeciding to act (Malle et al., 2000).

Even though people explain most intentional behaviorsby reference to the agents reasons, they explain some ofthem by pointing to factors that lay in the background ofthose reasons. Explaining actions by attributing them tothese background factors constitutes a separate explanationmode labeled causal history of reason explanation. Thecausal history of reasons includes the agents unconscious,personality, upbringing, culture, and subtle aspects of theimmediate context. Whereas reason explanations try tocapture what the agent had on his or her mind when decid-ing to act, causal history explanations take a step back andtry to capture processes that led up to the agents reasonsbut that the agent did not actively consider in the formationof an intention. Peoples selection between these twomodes of explanation is governed by processes of cognitiveaccess, impression management, and conversational parsi-mony. These processes account for explainers favoringreasons over causal history explanations when presentingthemselves in a rational light (Malle et al., 2000), whenaccounting for the actions of individual agents rather thanthose of whole groups (OLaughlin & Malle, 2002), andwhen explaining their own rather than another persons ac-tions (Malle et al., 2007).

The third mode of explaining intentional actions doesnot address motivational questions (Why? For what rea-son?) but the question of success conditions (How wasthis possible?). These enabling factor explanations, al-ready analyzed by Heider, are chosen when a difficult ac-tion succeeded (e.g., acing an exam) and the explainerwants to capture what made it possible, what enabled theagent to turn the intention into action (McClure & Hilton,1998; Malle et al., 2000). The choice between reason ex-planations and enabling factor explanations is illustrated bytwo straightforward findings: People virtually never useenabling factor explanations when accounting for easy ac-tions (because their success is not in question) or for actionswith unclear motives (because their explanation demandsclarifying those motives first). Only when people explainan achievement, a difficult behavior, and when specificallyasked How was this possible?, do they increase the oth-erwise rare use of enabling factor explanations (Malle etal., 2000).

In addition to distinguishing multiple modes of explana-tion, the folk-conceptual theory also identifies specific

types within explanation modes, in particular within reasonexplanations. Explainers choose between belief reasonsand desire reasons, a choice that is once more governed bylevels of cognitive access and impression management mo-tives (Malle et al., 2007). People also employ or omit spe-cific linguistic tools, especially mental-state verbs such asI want or she thinks, that allow them both to providean explanation and to fulfill a particular social function for example, to distance themselves from the agents actionor his perception of the situation (e.g., Hes dressing upbecause he thinks he is going on a date with her).

Audience demands (e.g., in question formulation andimpression management) reflect the social-communicativeside of explanations, which was the focus of considerableadvances in attribution work during the late 1980s and ear-ly 1990s. Hiltons (1990) innovative analysis showed thatattributions are not only in the head as cognitive opera-tions to solve puzzles but also function as communicativetools: They obey basic conversational norms and influencepeoples social interactions. For example, by giving an ex-planation, people clarify, justify, convince, or denigrate;explanations are demanded or offered; and they impress anaudience or save one from blame (Antaki & Leudar, 1992;Tedeschi & Reiss, 1981). This insight aligns well with Hei-ders attempt to study the concepts of common-sense psy-chology in their everyday conversational context. After all,the tools of social perception serve to accomplish peoplesgoals in social interaction.

The Importance of Mental States asObjects of Social Perception

In chapter 2 of his 1958 book, Heider analyzed the folkconcept of a person and noted that persons are perceivedas action centers and as such can do something to us. Theycan benefit or harm us intentionally, and we can benefit orharm them. Persons have abilities, wishes, and sentiments;they can act purposefully, and can perceive or watch us(Heider, 1958, p. 21). Besides highlighting intentionality asa central constituent of the person concept, Heider identi-fies here abilities and various mental states (wishes, senti-ments, perceptions) as objects of social perception. In fact,Heider usually singled out mental states as the most impor-tant causes that the social perceiver infers from behavior:[M]otives, intentions, sentiments, etc. are the core pro-cesses which manifest themselves in overt behavior(p. 34). Heider sometimes referred to traits and abilitieswhen talking about dispositions (e.g., p. 30, p. 80), butmental states make up the majority of what he subsumedunder dispositional properties (pp. 3134), particularlywhen explicating naive analysis of action (chapter 4).Among mental states, the agents motives occupied a spe-cial role in the perceivers attempt to understand other peo-ple: The underlying causes of events, especially the mo-



tives of other persons, are the invariances of the environ-ment that are relevant to [the perceiver]; they give meaningto what he experiences (Heider, 1958, p. 81) and bringorder into the array of behavior (p. 32).

This emphasis on mental states reflects Heiders goal toaccount for social perception in interpersonal behavior. Forwhen interacting with other people, it is their beliefs, de-sires, perceptions, and emotions that are of greatest import,as they allow coordination of the dynamic stages of a con-versation, negotiation, instruction, or persuasion.

Heiders emphasis on mental states also aligns closelywith recent research into the childs theory of mind, and itresonates with social-psychological work on perspectivetaking, empathic accuracy, and moral judgment. However,peoples engagement with mental states has been represent-ed far less in attribution research proper. Jones and Davis(1965) narrowed the broad Heiderian term disposition torefer to character traits and attitudes only, and dispositionalattribution research became trait inference research. Attri-bution scholars never explicitly ruled out mental states asimportant objects of inference, but few included them intheir theories or research.

The focus on traits can also be seen in the choice ofmethodologies. Asch (1946), one of the first social psy-chologists to study person perception and impression for-mation, introduced target persons by means of a list of per-sonality traits, a frequently used method since. Also, manystudies on the inference of dispositions have relied on aparadigm by Jones and Harris (1967) that tested peopleswillingness to attribute an attitude to a target person. Par-ticipants were asked to restrict their response to a check onthe researchers rating scale rather than freely explainingwhy they thought the target person acted the way (s)he did.

The tide may be changing, however, as empirical re-search on mental state inferences is increasing in socialpsychology journals (e.g., Ames, 2004; Epley, Keysar, VanBoven, & Gilovich, 2004; Hassin, Aarts, & Ferguson,2005; Kozak, Marsh, & Wegner, 2006; Reeder et al., 2004;Simpson, Oria, & Ickes, 2003), and an integration of thedifferent approaches may not be far off (Ames et al., 2001;Uleman et al., 2008). As one illustration of this research, Itake a new look at the well-known hypothesis of actor-ob-server asymmetries in attribution, which previously had astrong trait focus.

Actor-Observer Asymmetries

Self and other are the two chief targets of social perception,and few assumptions are as compelling as the one that cog-nition about oneself (the actor perspective) differs in im-portant ways from cognition about others (the observerperspective). Heider was keenly aware of actor-observerasymmetries in social perception, though his observationsare scattered across the 1958 book and his Notebooks (Hei-

der, 19871989). This quote, however, can be found inmost writings about Heider:

It seems that behavior in particular has such salient propertiesit tends to engulf the total field rather than be confined to itsproper position as a local stimulus whose interpretation re-quires the additional data of a surrounding field the situationin social perception. (Heider, 1958, p. 54).

The hypothesis that behavior engulfs the field has longbeen considered the central explanation of both the actor-observer asymmetry in causal attribution (Jones & Nisbett,1972) and the fundamental attribution error (FAE; Ross,1977). It should be noted that these two phenomena aredistinct in that the FAE concerns unwarranted trait infer-ences from single behaviors, whereas the actor-observerasymmetry concerns the differing explanations people pro-vide for their own and other peoples behaviors. I will dis-cuss in some detail the actor-observer asymmetry in lightof recent data and also examine some implications of thisresearch for the FAE.

Based on the assumption that peoples behavior expla-nations refer to either person or situation causes, Jones andNisbett (1972) proposed the classic hypothesis of an actor-observer asymmetry in explanation: There is a pervasivetendency for actors to attribute their actions to situationalrequirements, whereas observers tend to attribute the sameactions to stable personal dispositions (p. 80). This asym-metry is regarded as robust and firmly established and isdescribed as such in every social psychology textbook.

A careful look at the empirical evidence, however, doesnot support Jones and Nisbetts hypothesis. A recent meta-analysis of 173 studies in 113 articles yielded average ef-fect sizes of = 0.015 to = 0.095, depending on statisticalmodels and specific attribution scores (Malle, 2006). Cor-rections for possible publication bias turned the averageeffect size to 0. The visual attention hypothesis, which wasinspired by Heiders dictum of the behavior engulfing theobservers field, did not fare much better. If the observersvisual attention is directed to the actors behavior whereasthe actors visual attention is directed to the situation,switching actors and observers visual perspective shouldeliminate the actor-observer asymmetry. In the initial testof this hypothesis, Storms (1973) indeed found both thestandard actor-observer difference (d = 0.48) and the pre-dicted reversal in the perspective switch condition (d =0.64). However, five subsequent studies between 1975and 1984 found no evidence either for the basic asymmetryin the control condition ( 0.23) or for the elimination ofthe asymmetry after perspective switching ( 0.29).

The classic actor-observer hypothesis, thus, looks to bedisconfirmed, and there is no indication that visual atten-tion differences cause substantial differences in the attribu-tions of actors and observers. Was Heider simply wrong inhis claim that behavior engulfs the observers field, and isthere really no difference between actors and observersexplanations of behavior?

Actually, Heider was correct in this respect: Social per-



ceivers attend to the other persons behavior a great deal,much less so to their own behavior and to the other personsmental states (Malle & Pearce, 2001). This attentional dif-ference is also reflected in the kinds of events people won-der about and try to explain: As observers, they explainmostly intentional observable actions; as actors, they ex-plain mostly unintentional mental states (Malle & Knobe,1997b). However, these patterns of attention tell us onlywhich events actors and observers explain (what effectsthey attend to); they do not tell us how they explain them(what causes or reasons they attend to).

Once we look at how actors and observers actually ex-plain behavior we discover not one but three actor-observerasymmetries. However, neither of them cuts along the per-son (or trait)situation dichotomy (Malle et al., 2007).Classifying behavior explanations into the modes and typesderived from the folk-conceptual theory of explanation(Malle, 1999, 2004), we found that (1) actors provide morereason explanations and fewer causal history explanationsthan observers do, (2) actors provide more belief reasonsand fewer desire reasons than observers do, and (3) actorslinguistically mark their belief reasons less often with amental state verb (such as I believe or I thought) thanobservers do. Each of these attributional patterns is concep-tually distinct and appears to be caused by different psy-chological processes, either cognitive access variables(e.g., actors remembering their own reasons; observersmore easily guessing desires from cultural knowledge) orimpression management variables (e.g., actors makingthemselves look good; observers distancing themselvesfrom the actor). Thus, the processes that bring about actor-observer asymmetries reflect the dual nature of behaviorexplanations as both cognitive and social tools. As cogni-tive tools, they make sense of events; as social tools, theymanage interactions (Hilton, 2007; Malle, 2004).

Taken together, a meta-analysis of the extant research onthe classic actor-observer hypothesis and a series of newempirical studies suggest that actors and observers do in-deed differ in their behavior explanations, but such differ-ences can be captured only with a model that takes serious-ly peoples own folk concepts of explanation; they cannotbe captured with a limited model of person-situation expla-nations.

What are the implications of these findings for the fun-damental attribution error? It depends on exactly what ismeant by this term. If the FAE is described as part of theactor-observer bias (e.g., Morris & Maisto, 2006, p. 450),it does not exist, because actors and observers do not differin their person attributions, situation attributions, or traitattributions. Similarly, if the FAE is formulated in terms ofexplanation tendencies within the observer perspective(e.g., people are inclined to offer dispositional explana-tions for behavior instead of situational ones, Ross & Nis-bett, 1991, p. 125), its existence is not supported by thedata. This is because people spontaneously refer to dispo-sitions (stable traits and attitudes) in only 510% percentof all behavior explanations, whereas they refer to the sit-

uation in about 20% of all behavior explanations (Malle,2004; Malle et al., 2007). Predominantly, people refer tomental states (in the form of reasons, causes, or causal his-tories), which make up 68% of all behavior explanations.We might, therefore, say that people are not dispositionists;they are mentalists.

Only the strict interpretation of the FAE as an overread-iness to make trait inferences from single behaviors is com-patible with the reported results. However, we must notexpect that people make such trait inferences very fre-quently; for if they did, we should see these inferred traitsmentioned far more often in behavior explanations. TheFAE could still be quite harmful in those (rare) cases whenit does occur. When a persons behavior is influenced bysituational forces but observers do not notice or appreciatethe power of these forces, unwarranted trait inferences mayensue, which can then lead to such social consequences asrejection, aggression, blame, or punishment. However, wedo not know how many behaviors are, as a matter of fact,more strongly influenced by the situation than observersbelieve; nor do we know how often, outside the laboratory,observers make a confident trait inference in those circum-stances. Therefore, and in light of the surprising fate of theclassic actor-observer hypothesis, it seems reasonable totake a fresh and critical look at the exact factors that un-derlie the fundamental attribution error (see Gawronski,2004; Krull, 2001).

Conclusion

Fritz Heiders (1958) book The Psychology of Interperson-al Behavior has an uncontested place in the history of socialpsychology. His insights were deep and numerous aboutthe role of inference in social perception, the principle ofcognitive consistency, the impact of folk theories, and thenature of the social mind that tries to make sense of otherminds. As a result, much of modern social psychology hasbeen influenced by Heiders creative, prophetic thinking.However, we should let the prophet speak in his ownwords. Then we will realize that the things he said oftendiffer from the things that are so commonly attributed tohim. Perhaps we should name this the exegetic attributionerror: readily ascribing claims to Heider that he did notmake while overlooking important claims that he did make.

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Bertram F. Malle

Department of PsychologyInstitute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences1227 University of OregonEugene OR 97403-1227USATel. +1 541 346-0475Fax +1 541 346-4911E-mail [email protected]



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Fritz Heider's Legacy. Celebrated Insights, Many of Them Misunderstood