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The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations.

Why this mattered

The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations mattered because it made ordinary social understanding a legitimate object of formal psychological theory. Heider argued that people act as “naive psychologists,” interpreting behavior by inferring causes, intentions, dispositions, pressures, and relations among persons and objects. That shifted social psychology away from treating interpersonal response mainly as attitude, stimulus, or learning, and toward analyzing the cognitive structures by which people make social life intelligible.

After Heider, researchers could study explanation itself: why observers see an action as caused by personality rather than circumstance, how responsibility and blame are assigned, and why triads of liking, disliking, and belief tend toward psychological “balance.” This opened the path to attribution theory, including Jones and Davis’s correspondent inference theory and Kelley’s covariation model, and gave later work on attribution bias, cognitive consistency, person perception, and moral judgment a shared vocabulary. Its balance-theoretic ideas also traveled beyond laboratory social psychology into network models of signed relations, where friendship, hostility, coalition formation, and group polarization could be represented as structured relational systems rather than as isolated attitudes.

Abstract

The psychology of interpersonal relations , The psychology of interpersonal relations , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)

  • enables → The Strength of Weak Ties — Heider's balance theory framed interpersonal tie valence and triadic relations that Granovetter extended into network-level weak-tie diffusion.
  • enables → A circumplex model of affect. — Heider's interpersonal psychology helped ground affect in relational evaluations, which Russell organized into the valence-arousal circumplex model.
  • cite ← The Strength of Weak Ties — Granovetter's weak-ties theory draws on Heider's interpersonal balance framework to reason about triads and relationship strength in social networks.
  • cite ← A circumplex model of affect. — Russell's affect circumplex relates emotional states along interpersonal dimensions influenced by Heider's balance-theory account of social perception.

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