Fritz Heider

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Fritz Heider (born February 19, 1896 in Vienna ; † February 1, 1988 in Lawrence , Kansas , USA ) was an Austrian psychologist with a gestalt theoretical orientation who lived and worked in the USA since 1930.

Heider was best known in German-speaking countries with the essay "Ding und Medium". He is considered the founder of the attribution theory and the POX balance theory and researched naive psychological views.

Life

Fritz Heider was born in Vienna in 1896 as the son of Moriz and Eugenie. When he was half a year old, the family moved to Graz in Styria . There his father was an architect for the state government. When Heider was six years old, his parents decided against going to a public school because of his sensitive and nervous disposition. Instead, he received private home tuition from a teacher. At the age of nine he attended a public preparatory class for future high school and secondary school students. In 1906 Heider injured his left eye while playing with a detonator. An explosion in front of his face injured his retina, causing his left eye to become blind. This circumstance saved him later from military service in the First World War . At the age of ten he first transferred to the Realgymnasium, but shortly afterwards he switched to a private grammar school, which was also attended by his brother Eduard, who was two years older than him. Later he decided to switch to the state grammar school with two schoolmates, as this promised a higher standard of teaching.

After graduating from high school, he began to study architecture , but broke off this course. Then he began to study law, but he also dropped out. This was followed by four years of further studies in psychology and philosophy at the University of Graz . In March 1920 he did his doctorate with Alexius Meinong with a thesis on causality. From 1921 he stayed in Munich and Berlin , where he worked with Max Wertheimer . In 1927 he became an assistant to William Stern in Hamburg . From the fall of 1930 he worked at Smith College with Kurt Koffka in Northampton (Massachusetts) . Just three months after his arrival, at Christmas 1930, he married Grace Moore, a colleague with whom he later translated Kurt Lewin's “Principles of Topological Psychology” into English. With her he had three sons: John, Karl and Stephan. In 1947 he was appointed to the University of Kansas . In 1958 his main work "The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations" was written. In 1965 he was appointed "University Distinguished Professor". The following year, 1966, he retired.

Act

Heider maintained relationships with important psychologists of the 20th century, including Charlotte and Karl Bühler , William Stern, the Gestalt psychologists Wolfgang Köhler , Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, and above all Kurt Lewin. As early as 1944 he wrote an essay on social perception . In the same year he and his student Marianne L. Simmel published the experiments on his attribution theory, known as the Heider-Simmel Study . With his groundbreaking research on the psychology of interpersonal relationships, Heider is considered to be the pioneer of a “psychology of everyday life”.

Honors

  • 1959: "Lewin Memorial Award" from the "Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI)"
  • 1965: Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award
  • 1981: Honorary doctorate from the University of Graz
  • 1981: Admission to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • 1987: Psychological Science Gold Medal

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Heider, Fritz: The life of a psychologist , engl. Orig. The Life of a Psychologist , 1983, University Press of Kansas, Weinheim / Basel: Beltz Verlag, 2004
  2. ^ Fritz Heider (1944). Social perception and phenomenal causality . Psychological Review, 51, pp. 358-374.
  3. ↑ Heider / Simmel 1944: An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior . American Journal of Psychology 57 (2): 243–259, full text (PDF; 3.9 MB)

Works

  • Ding und Medium , Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-931659-71-2 (first published in 1926).
  • The life of a psychologist , autobiography, Beltz, Weinheim 2004, ISBN 3-407-22756-6 .
  • Psychology of interpersonal relations (original title: The psychology of interpersonal relations ), Klett, Stuttgart 1977, ISBN 3-12-923410-1 .

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Heider, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-American psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH February 19, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH February 1, 1988
Place of death Lawrence , Kansas