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This article reviews some of the central ideas in Heider's (1958 ) book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations: common-sense psychology, personal causality, causal attribution, and the social perception of mental states. Relying on Heider's own words to introduce these topics, the review shows that post-Heiderian attribution research overlooked and misunderstood several of Heider's contributions. For example, he has been falsely portrayed as postulating a person-situation dichotomy as the core of people's understanding of behavior; and his analysis of dispositions as primarily mental states has been mistaken for one of dispositions as stable traits. Heider's original ideas are, however, firmly connected to cognitive science research on the folk theory of mind and provide a foundation for recent social-psychological work on inferences of other people's mental states.