Naïve scientist
Also known as: Intuitive scientist
The early model of people as rational, logical causal reasoners.
What it means
An influential metaphor in attribution theory portraying the ordinary person as a rational, systematic analyst who gathers evidence and reasons logically to infer the causes of behavior. Rooted in Heider's view of the layperson as an intuitive scientist, it framed Kelley's covariation model, which cast attribution as a quasi-statistical analysis. Accumulating evidence of systematic biases — base-rate neglect, the fundamental attribution error, motivated reasoning — undermined the metaphor, showing that people deviate sharply from normative inference. It was succeeded by the cognitive-miser and then the motivated-tactician models, which depict reasoning as effort-conserving and goal-driven rather than dispassionately rational. The trajectory of these metaphors charts the field's shift from idealized to realistic models of social cognition.
Examples
Heider's image of the person carefully weighing consensus and consistency to explain a friend's outburst exemplifies the naïve-scientist view.
A manager wondering why a report was late checks whether that person misses other deadlines and whether colleagues missed this one too — reasoning exactly as the covariation model assumes.
The metaphor's limits show when the same manager blames a courier's lateness on laziness and never on the snowstorm, skipping the evidence-gathering an actual scientist would insist on.
First described in Heider (1958); developed by Kelley (1967).