Fatalism as an Animistic Attribution Process

Following the perspective of Heider, fatalistic thinking is analyzed as an example of "naive" or "implicit" social psychology. "Garden variety" forms of fatalistic explanations are shown to be attribution errors where the nature of the error is perceiving "natural" events through schemata appropriate to personal causality. It is argued that natural events which have the properties of "personalism" and "hedonic relevance" lead to a perception of events as possessing "equifinality," the distinguishing feature of personal causation in Heider's analysis. Fatalism is therefore an inherently animistic form of cognition, and all animistic cosmologies are therefore seen as supporting this "error" by lending plausibility to the attribution. Implications for further theoretical and empirical research are discussed.