Fritz Heider: Quotes about personality

“[Unlike objects, people are] usually perceived as action centers and as such can do something to us. They can benefit or harm us intentionally, and we can benefit or harm them. Persons have abilities, wishes, and sentiments; they can act purposefully, and can perceive or watch us. They are systems having an awareness of their surroundings and their conduct refers to this environment, an environment that sometimes includes ourselves.”

Fritz Heider

Source: The psychology of interpersonal relations, 1958, p. 21 ; as cited in: Albert A. Harrison (1976), Individuals and Groups: Understanding Social Behavior, p. 88

People , Personality

“Man is usually not content simply to register the observables that surround him; he needs to refer them as far as possible to the invariances of his environment.. The underlying causes of events, especially the motives of other persons, are the invariances of the environment that are relevant to him; they give meaning to what he experiences and it is these meanings that are recorded in his life space and are precipitated as the reality of the environment to which he then reacts.”

Fritz Heider

Source: The psychology of interpersonal relations, 1958, p. 81

Life , Motivation , Reality , Personality

“Personal causality, refers to instances in which p causes x intentionally. That is to say, the action is purposive.”

Fritz Heider

Source: The psychology of interpersonal relations, 1958, p. 100

Personality

“In the basic case, where the person is concerned with the dispositional properties of his surrounding environment, the choice is between external attribution and internal (self) attribution.”

Fritz Heider

Source: The psychology of interpersonal relations, 1958, p. 194

Personality

“The action outcome, x, may then be said to be dependent upon a combination of effective personal force and effective environmental force, thus:
x = f (ff person, ff environment).
One is tempted to formulate the underlying relation between the two independent variables as an additive one, for if the effective environmental force is zero (which would mean that the combination of environmental factors neither hinders nor furthers the result at), then x will depend only on the effective personal force.”

Fritz Heider

Source: The psychology of interpersonal relations, 1958, p. 82

Dependency , Personality