Toward a Unified System of Social and Personal Motivation

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sis with respect to social motivation. Weiner begins with the thesis that people search for order in social motivation. He articulates a system of how order is sought and some of its features as it is sought and acted on by naive perceivers. Weiner's present statement is broad in the extent to which it encompasses varied phenomena and raises many questions about the nature of a perceiver's attributions of causes of other's behavior and perceptions of other based on such attributions. As before, Weiner's analysis is particularly creative in its postulation of mediating conditions between attributions of causes and motives and accompanying evaluations of another person. Weiner lucidly weaves an argument from perceptions of ability and effort as key mediators of attributed causality to perceptions of the controllability of behavior to perceptions of intention and effort, with the latter viewed as representing components of perceived responsibility. Overall, this analysis represents a nuanced statement of how perceptions of responsibility are developed by people in observing others and reminds us again of Heider's (1958) seminal ideas of responsibility in Heider' s statement of the naive analysis of action. Although Weiner borrowed some of the theoretical underpinning for perceptions of causality and social motivation from Heider in the beginning of his program of research, his more recent work has refined greatly the original positions and now represents one of the most detailed and original statements of social motivation in the literature. Our commentary on Weiner's target article centers on four issues: 1. We raise the question of extent to which people' s