Social perception is the study of people making sense of other people and themselves. It was originally termed "person perception," but the rising research on the self demanded a more general label. The cognitive turn in social psychology made it more fashionable to say "social cognition," which is either synonymous with "social perception" or refers to the specific tradition of examining underlying cognitive processes and freely using cognitive methods, such as reaction times, priming, decontextualized judgment tasks, etc.

Not only once have scholars asked, "Where is the social in social cognition?" By the time we reach 2000, the answer may be in what some of us hope to be the "interpersonal turn" in social psychology.

Sparks that ignited the study of social perception:

• Fritz Heider, with his work on balance theory and people's "naive theory of action," which later became (reduced to) attribution theory
• Solomon Asch, with early work on impression formation
• Stanley Schachter, with work on affiliation and a social-cognitive theory of emotion
• Edward E. (Ned) Jones, with work on ingratiation and "correspondent inferences" from behavior to underlying dispositions
• Harold H. Kelley, with follow-up work on impression formation and, most notably, a "formalized" version of attribution theory

Attribution theory

Heider was originally interested in attributions as interpretations of sense data (in his Ph.D. thesis 1925). Within the phenomenological tradition, the question was always how we make contact with the real world if our minds only have sense data (impressions, experiences) available. The Gestalt psychologists tried to identify the principles by which the mind infers the world from sense data ("makes sense of them"), and Heider asked how we "attribute sense data to certain objects in the world." Attribution is thus an act of interpretation in which "the given" (e.g., an impression) is linked back to its origin. From there, it was only a small step to think about attribution as "causal analysis."

In his famous 1958 book, The psychology of interpersonal relations, Heider sketched out what he termed people's "naive theory of action"---the conceptual framework by which people interpret, explain, and predict others' behavior. In this framework, intentional concepts (e.g., beliefs, desires, trying, purpose) played a central role; but Heider also had adopted Lewin's distinction between person and situation causes and claimed that people use this distinction in their explanations of behavior. The tension between intentional concepts on the one hand and the person-situation distinction on the other was never resolved; Heider did not clarify their relationship, and subsequent theories simply dropped intentional concepts and focused on the simpler person-situation distinction.

Jones and Davis (1965) analyzed how people infer dispositions from behavior, and they saw judgments of intention as prerequisites for judgments of dispositions. But the field only picked up on the later (dispositional) part, and Kelley's (1967) model of attribution processes made no reference to intentions anymore.

This omission, and the resulting conceptual narrowness of attribution theory, motivated me to return to Heider (the intentional Heider) and explore once more how people actually conceptualize human behavior and explain it in their own words. People's conceptual framework, I argue, is centered on the concept of intentionality---people reliably distinguish between intentional and unintentional behavior, and they explain intentional behavior with reasons and unintentional behavior with causes. The proposed account of the differences between intentional and unintentional behavior and between reason and cause explanations clarifies past research, makes novel predictions, and offers a descriptive model that can be applied to the study of impression formation, self-presentation, misunderstandings, and interpersonal conflict. The details of this model can be found in the assigned reading and in this article.