Evolving Models of the Social Knower

Abstract

Fritz Heider, like Dewey, Kelly, and Piaget, had advanced the enlightenment competence model (Flanagan, 1991) of social thinkers as naive scientists. He posited that, like formal scientists, they seek to identify causes of events so as to attain prediction and control over them: Attributions are the causal explanations made (Chapter 2). Heider also posited that attributions are partitioned between the person and the situation by implicit subtraction; if personal forces exceed environmental ones, a personal attribution is made. For a time, interpersonal attributions dominated research in social cognition (Kelley & Michela, 1980); as evidenced in subsequent chapters (e.g., 11 and 12), they continue to be investigated and reinterpreted. Heider’s theory has been very generative, but only some of its speculations have survived verification, and its naive scientist model has proved to be only part of the story. This section covers theories of interpersonal attributions proposed by Edward E. (Ned) Jones and Harold Kelley, landmark experiments testing them, and early questioning of the adequacy of this theoretical model and methodological approach.¹