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.