Attribution Theory

Founded by psychologist Fritz Heider, who began studying interpersonal behavior and social perception in the 1940s, culminating in his 1958 book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. Heider proposed that people act as "naive scientists" who seek to understand behavior by attributing causes to either internal (personal) or external (situational) factors. His work, cited over 26,000 times, pioneered attribution theory and profoundly impacted social psychology, spawning related models by Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner.