Fritz Heider's foundational work in social psychology starts from a disarmingly simple observation: we are natural storytellers about other people's intentions, and we are systematically wrong.

We do not perceive other people's behaviour neutrally. We interpret it — and we interpret it, almost always, as being more intentional, more personally directed, and more reflective of stable character than it actually is. Someone bumps into us on the street and we register rudeness before we register haste. A colleague fails to respond to an email and we construct a narrative about coldness or hostility before we consider busyness or oversight. A friend's distraction during a conversation becomes, in our perception, a statement about how much they value us. Heider called this the tendency toward personal attribution — the cognitive habit of locating the cause of events in the dispositions of the people involved rather than in the circumstances surrounding them.

This is not a failure of intelligence. It is, Heider argued, a structural feature of how social perception works. We are built to read intention. The capacity to infer what another person is thinking, wanting, and planning — what he called naive psychology, the informal theory of mind that every person applies to everyone around them — is one of the most sophisticated things human cognition does. But sophistication carries its own distortions. The same machinery that allows us to anticipate and understand other people also leads us to over-apply intentional explanation, to find personal meaning in what is accidental, to see ourselves as the target of behaviour that was never aimed at us at all.

The implications for empathy are direct and somewhat deflating. The errors Heider describes are not corrected by good intentions or emotional warmth. They operate below the level of conscious reflection, shaping perception before interpretation begins. To practice genuine empathy — to understand another person's behaviour as it actually is, shaped by a specific constellation of ability, circumstance, opportunity, and constraint — requires actively working against the cognitive habits that social perception has made automatic. It requires, in particular, the deliberate effort to ask what external forces might explain what we are inclined to attribute to character.

Tolstoy understood this before psychology had a framework for it. Anna Karenina is destroyed not by her own choices alone but by the attribution errors of everyone around her. Society reads her pursuit of Vronsky as moral failure — a stable disposition toward selfishness and transgression — rather than as a response to the specific conditions of her marriage, her emotional life, and the suffocating constraints of her social world. Karenin reads her unhappiness as a personal affront. Vronsky reads her desperation as instability. Each constructs a causal story that centres on Anna's character and minimises the forces that shaped her behaviour from outside. Tolstoy, with characteristic precision, shows us each of these readings from the inside — lets us feel their internal coherence — and then shows us what they miss. What he cannot show, because fiction always retains the author's correcting intelligence, is what happens when no such correction arrives.

Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1988) is that correction's absence made documentary. The film reconstructs the murder of a Dallas police officer and the conviction of Randall Dale Adams — a man who was almost certainly innocent — through the accumulated testimony of witnesses, investigators, and jurors who were all completely certain they understood what had happened. What Morris assembles, with characteristic patience and without editorialising, is a portrait of attribution error operating at institutional scale. Every person in the chain of judgment located the cause of the crime in the most available personal explanation — the stranger, the drifter, the man without roots — rather than examining the circumstances that pointed elsewhere. The machinery of naive psychology, which Heider described as a structural feature of individual perception, turns out to work the same way when multiplied across a courtroom. Certainty compounds. The internal coherence of each person's causal story reinforces everyone else's. And a man spends twelve years on death row because no one thought to ask what external forces might explain what they had already decided to attribute to character.