FRITZ HEIDER'S ATTRIBUTION THEORYIntroductionThis article begins with a man seeing his wife serve on a jury in a federal case involving conspiracy, racketeering, drug dealing, armed robbery and extortion. There were seven accused and one who escaped from police custody. The government's key witness was a former gang member named Larry, called "the Canary" by the defendants because he had become an informant. For two months Jean, his wife, listened to Larry's testimony and tried to understand whether his account of the accident was credible or not. A question on his mind was whether his behavior on the witness stand was that of a pathological liar, a rejected friend seeking revenge, a petty con man who would say anything to save his own skin, or an honest witness dedicated to the truth ? This all falls into Fritz Heider's attribution theory saying that we all tend to rationalize in the same way. Fritz stated that attribution theory is the process of drawing inferences. This would mean seeing a person take action and immediately coming to a conclusion that goes beyond simple sensory information. Example: Larry yawns while on the witness stand. Your immediate and final reaction would be "he's bored, he's afraid, he's tired, or he's indifferent." In the article it is said that Heider would see us as naive psychologists who apply common sense to interpersonal judgment. He also says we can't help him make these judgments. This is because we make personality judgments to explain otherwise confusing behavior. Heider says there's another reason to make causal inferences from behavior. The reason is because we want to know what to expect in the future. He says prediction is a survival skill. Example: Jean comes face to face with one of the defendants, while following the jury, outside a train station. Slightly anxious, she turned quickly. Accurate attributions can help us know which people might harm us. The article also talks about attribution as a three-step process through which we perceive others as causal agents. The three-step process we talked about includes action perception (did you see it), intention judgment (you/they intended to do it), and disposition attribution (what do you think about the action). AnalysisTo begin with, in the case with Jean trying to figure out if Larry's story was credible and how to classify his behavior. In my opinion I would think he is becoming an informant