Heider
Heider, Fritz
World War 1 active service
World War I (1914 - 1918). Psychology was first used widely in the First World War in 1917, when mass psychometric testing was carried out by the US Army. Psychologists also studied 'shell shock' or war neuroses (later recognised as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD)\nIt could be argued that applied psychology was effectively born during World War I. For instance, studies of fatigue in munitions factories were the first major industrial psychology studies to be conducted. Psychologists also worked on specific programs, like for instance, the selection of hydrophone operators best suited for 'hearing submarines'. According to Hearnshaw (The Shaping of Modern Psychology, 1989), the work of psychologists during World War I “helped to establish the claims of applied psychology, and led to its continuation on a still small, but nevertheless significant, scale” (p. 200). Written by: Course Team
Social Cognition
Social cognition. This field of psychology examines the processing of social knowledge - perceiving, thinking, judging and explaining objects, events, relationships and issues in the social world. As a broad topic it involves some attempt to integrate cognitive and social psychology. It tends to depend on the experimental methods of cognitive psychology and thus is a substantial part of EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY.
Heider was born in Vienna in 1896. After completing his PhD on the role of environmental factors on the perception of different objects, Heider began studies at the Psychological Institute in Berlin where his tutors included Kohler, Wertheimer and Lewin. During the 1930s he moved to the United States where he remained for the rest of his career.
Work by Max Wertheimer and the Ethics of Spinoza also influenced Heider. His book, with its ideas on attribution, has influenced a large number of researchers in the area of attribution and led to a substantial body of both experimental and theoretical work.
Based on entry in The Biographical Dictionary of Psychology, edited by Noel Sheehy, A.J.Chapman and Wendy Conroy (London, Routledge).
Heider also had a deep interest in geography and maps, wanting to find out how parts of a region lay in relation to each other. Transferring this analogy to Psychology, he wanted to understand relations between ideas and concepts and to place the results of experimental papers that he read on what he thought of as the map of psychology.
Heider was based at the University of Kansas for most of his career. He died in 1988.
From an early age, Heider was preoccupied with ideas about relations between people, which were inte nsified during the years of World War I. Years later this preoccupation manifested itself in his book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (1958).
Later contact with Kurt Lewin and the philosopher Cassirer, with their emphasis on the importance of theory, strengthened the approach that his fascination with maps had already brought to his psychological thinking. Later came a struggle to find systematic concepts that could be used to deal with the everyday events of life.
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