HEIDER’S BALANCE THEORY
HEIDER’S BALANCE THEORY Most writers usually credit Fritz Heider (1946) with the earliest articulation of a consistency theory. As a psychologist, Heider was concerned with the way an individual organizes attitudes toward people and objects in relation to one another within that individual's own cognitive structure. Heider postulated that unbalanced states produce tension and generate forces to restore balance. He says that "the concept of a balanced state designates a situation in which the perceived units and the experienced sentiments co-exist without stress". Heider's paradigm focused on two individuals, a person (P), the object of the analysis, some other person (O), and a physical object, idea, or event (X). Heider's concern was with how relationships among these three entities are organized in the mind of one individual (P). Heider distinguished two types of relationships among these three entities, liking (L) and unit (U) relations (cause, possession, si...