PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1577720
The rediscovery of Fritz Heider's early social cognition: a personcentered perspective
Provisionally accepted
- 1Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, China
- 2Center for Brain, Mind and Education, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, China
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In this article, we situate the social psychologist and philosopher Fritz Heider's theory within what we call "early social cognition," a historical approach preceding and radically differing from contemporary "social cognition." By incorporating recent developments in issues such as perception, animacy, and social structures (networks), we reassess key aspects of Heider's system to demonstrate their present-day significance. This analysis does not merely reiterate Heider's ideas but shifts the methodological focus from his causal analysis of event attribution to a constitutive scientific explanation. In particular, we examine Heider's early focus on the perceptual realism of the general object and his emphasis on the person-thing distinction. By engaging with contemporary developments on the animate-inanimate subcategorical distinction, we argue that Heider's personcentered perspective may offer a unified theoretical framework for the construction of theories in social cognition.…social cognitive psychology will never be a literal translation of cognitive psychology.
Keywords: animacy perception, Fritz Heider, common-sense psychology, Cognitive revolution, Person Perception, social perception, agency
Received: 16 Feb 2025; Accepted: 06 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Shang, Dong and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Da Dong, Center for Brain, Mind and Education, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, China
Wei Chen, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, 312000, Zhejiang Province, China
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