Every day the social perceiver makes numerous, apparently complex social judgments – Predicting another's behavior, attributing responsibility, categorizing an individual, evaluating anothers, estimating the power or influence of a person, or attributing causality. A central task of social psychology has been to determine how the social perceiver makes these judgments. Until recently, research on this topic was marked by a rationalistic bias, the assumption that judgments are made using thorough, optimal strategies (see, for example, Fischhoff, 1976, for discussion of this point). Errors in judgment were attributed to two sources: (a) accidental errors due to problems with information of which the perceiver was presumably unaware; and (b) errors which resulted from the irrational motives and needs of the perceiver.

Within social psychology this perspective is represented by research on causal attribution. In early attribution formulations (e.g., Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967) the social perceiver was characterized as a naive scientist who gathered information from multiple sources in the environment to make attributions regarding cause-effect relations. When departures from these normative models were observed, they were believed to stem from biases such as hedonic relevance (Jones & Davis, 1965) or other egocentric needs (see Miller & Ross, 1975).