Situations
Situations
Entry prepared for:
Corr, P. J. and Matthews, G. (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Personality, Cambridge
University Press.
Seth A. Wagerman
David C. Funder
Department of Psychology
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
USA
seth.wagerman@email.ucr.edu
funder@ucr.edu
Note: Preparation of this chapter was supported, in part, by National Science
Foundation grant BCS-0642243 and a Visiting Research Fellowship from the Max
Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin) to the second author.
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What people do depends, to an important extent, on the situation they are in. But
while this fact has been discussed and sometimes disputed for the past several
decades, situations rarely receive the focused examination they deserve. What is
known about the psychological properties of situations?
In this chapter, we pose a number of questions about situations and attempt to
provide answers to some of them. Are persons, situations and behaviors so hopelessly
entangled that they can never be teased apart? How can a situation be defined, and
what are its properties? How have past researchers gone about studying situations?
What remains to be done?
Why Study Situations?
The key question of psychology is: what causes people to behave the way they
do? The stakes were high, therefore, when protagonists of the “person-situation
debate” argued about whether behavior is mainly determined by the characteristic
personality of the individual, or his or her immediate situation (Mischel, 1968; Kenrick &
Funder, 1988; Swann & Seyle, 2005). Among other implications, the debate seemed to
pit two major subfields of psychology against each other: personality psychology, which
generally emphasizes the influence of the person, and social psychology, which
emphasizes the situation (Funder & Ozer, 1983; Ross & Nisbett, 1991). Yet despite the
vehemence of the person-situation debate, its deep roots, its wide implications, and its
persistence into the 21st century, the underlying dichotomy is arguably false (Funder,
2006; Roberts & Pomerantz 2004). While it is possible to identify and to compare
statistical main effects of personal and situational variables, it is not true that one gains
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power only at the expense of the other. Strong effects of situations and strong effects of
persons can and often do coexist in the very same data, and the degree to which a
given behavior is affected by one of these variables may be unrelated to the degree to
which it is affected by the other (in one study, the empirical correlation between
individual consistency and situational change, across behaviors, was r = -.01; Funder &
Colvin, 1991).
Modern psychology still has not fully accommodated this realization, but it has a
long history. Kurt Lewin (1951) expressed it in terms of his classic formula, B = f (P, S)
(behavior is a function of an interaction between the person and the situation) 1. This
implies that if a researcher knew everything there was to know about a person,
psychologically, and also knew everything there was to know about the psychological
aspects of the situation he or she was in, the ability to predict the individual’s behavior
should follow as a matter of course. More recent writings have suggested that the three
elements of Lewin’s formula – behavior, person and situation – form a “personality triad”
in the sense that if any two were completely understood, the third should in principle be
derivable (Funder, 2001, 2006; see also Bandura, 1978), which suggests two additional
formulae. One is P = f (S,B) (i.e., to know everything about a person entails knowledge
of what he or she would do in any situation). This notion resembles Mischel’s (1999)
“if…then” conception in which an individual’s personality is represented in terms of his
or her characteristic pattern of behavior across situations (see Shoda, Mischel & Wright,
Contemporary interactionists often interpret Lewin’s dictum statistically, as a
regression formula of sorts: B = f(P + S + (P x S)), but this is not what Lewin intended.
His use of a comma as the operator between the two constructs was instead meant to
convey his belief that the person and situation formed a “mutually dependent” unit, the
“life space” (Lewin, 1951, p. 240).
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1994). The other formula is S = f (P,B) (complete understanding of a situation entails
knowing what any person would do in it), reminiscent of Bem and Funder’s (1978)
“template matching” conception which described situations in terms of the people who
would behave in specified ways within them.
The translation of this abstract theoretical structure into empirical research
requires specific variables and methods for describing and assessing persons,
behaviors, and situations. However, the methodological foundations of the elements of
the personality triad are seriously unbalanced. Methods for measuring aspects of
persons are readily available, including countless personality inventories and the 100
comprehensive items of the California Adult Q-sort (CAQ; (Block, 1961/1978; Bem &
Funder, 1978)2. Many means for measuring behaviors are also available, ranging from
reaction time to measures of attitude change, obedience, and altruism. A general tool,
the Riverside Behavioral Q-sort (RBQ; Funder, Furr & Colvin, 2000), is in increasingly
wide use, has been has been translated into German and Dutch (Spinath & Spinath,
2004; De Corte & Buysse, n.d.), and a revision that expands its range of application has
recently been completed.
However, even though the past half-decade of social psychological literature has
granted the lion’s share of explanatory power to situational forces, still missing is any
real technology for defining, for characterizing, or measuring them. This lack has been
noted repeatedly: Swann and Seyle (2005) argue that certain current avenues of
research – such as Mischel and Shoda’s (1999) CAPS model – will not recognize their
full potential until “the development of a comprehensive taxonomy of situations” (p.
Terminological note: The term Q-set is often used to refer to the list of items that, when rated,
become a complete Q-sort, but for simplicity the present chapter will use the term Q-sort
throughout.
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162). Mischel himself once suggested that describing differences in situations might be
more productive than describing the behaviors of people in them (Mischel & Peake,
1983). Hogan and Roberts (2000) lament that that in 90 years of research social
psychology still has yet to offer a reasonable taxonomy of situations, and Endler (1993)
rates our knowledge of situations as being in “the dark ages” (pg. 258) in comparison to
our knowledge of individual differences. Funder (2000) points out that “little is
empirically known or even theorized about how situations influence behavior, or what
the basic kinds of situations are (or, alternatively, what variables are useful for
comparing one situation with another)” (p. 211). Kenny, Mohr and Levesque (2001)
note that we lack “major competing schemes” let alone a “universally-accepted scheme
for understanding what is meant by situation” (p. 129). Gelfand (2007) has gone so far
as to accuse scientists of making the fundamental attribution error in regards to their
taxonomical priorities. Clearly, the need to study situations is not in question. The
question is: how might we go about doing so?
Defining Situations
As Asendorpf (this volume) correctly observes, the very definition of a situation is
“a tricky question” (p. 10 of ms.). One problem concerns where to set the boundaries.
For example, one might very simply describe a situation in terms of place or locality, in
which case “in the Czech Republic” is as valid a situation as “in the grocery store.” But
at best, this sort of description provides little more than a label. The psychologicallyrelevant attributes of the setting remain to be characterized and explored. Therefore,
one might attempt to define situations on a very molecular level – a snapshot of the
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exact and complex arrangement of all things physical, psychological and social at a
particular moment in time. But because every moment is always different from the next,
this approach makes it difficult to state where one situation ends and the next begins.
“Eating lunch in the cafeteria” might be segmented into (literally) a number of bite-sized
situations. While there may or may not be something psychologically different between
the first mouthful of Salisbury steak and the last, a definition of situations that tries to
take into account minute-by-minute3 variances in the physical and/or social environment
quickly becomes unwieldy.
A second definitional problem involves perspective. The short airplane flight from
Los Angeles, CA to Las Vegas, NV would be described very differently indeed from the
eyes of a severe aviophobe than it would be from the eyes of a frequent flier or from the
eyes of the pilot (one hopes). A high school dance might be described as
“demoralizing” or “lame” by a certain teen, but as “romantic” and “memorable” by
another and “precious” or perhaps “tiresome” by the chaperones. Does a situation have
independent properties of its own outside of the perceptions of the people in it?
Both of these definitional questions raise difficult philosophical puzzles and a final
resolution to either one is not in sight. However, that does not mean that further
conceptualization and research must remain immobilized. For purposes of our own
current research, summarized briefly later in this chapter, we have developed
provisional answers to each. The first of these questions, concerning boundaries, can
be provisionally finessed by asking people to use their common sense when answering
the question, what situation are you in right now? Either a participant or observer, we
3
Indeed, why stop there? On a truly molecular level, each nanosecond sees a subtly altered
individual interacting with a subtly altered environment.
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believe, is likely to immediately identity the psychologically pertinent limits to the
situation he or she is in, or is observing, and will be able to describe it as “studying for
finals,” “arguing with my room-mate” and so on. Whether situations so defined can be
further characterized in psychologically interesting and useful ways, is an empirical
question. The second definitional question, we believe, requires at least a provisional
answer of “yes,” for any effort to characterize situations to proceed. Without denying
that a given situation may have different meanings for every individual in it, the analysis
of any situation surely must begin with an attempt to specify the attributes of it that are
psychologically relevant to people in general.
Conceptualizing Situations
One of the earliest and most notable conceptions of situations comes from Henry
Murray (1938), whose theories illuminate the question of whether or not situations and
persons are separable. Specifically, he was interested in the role that the environment
played in a person’s ability to express his or her psychogenic needs4 and dubbed the
forces exerted on behavior by an environment its press. He distinguished between the
forces that are intrinsically present in situations – which he called alpha press – and the
forces that come about from an individual’s idiosyncratic reaction to objective properties
of the situation – which he called beta press. This distinction is useful in that it intimates
that situation do exist in some form outside of people’s individual perceptions of them.
A very crude example is that of getting stuck in a walk-in freezer: the freezer, with no
one in it, still has the intrinsic property of being quite cold. Once someone accidentally
4
Murray posited 27 basic needs, the best-known of which are the need for power, achievement,
and affiliation.
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is stuck in it, the situation may be seen as terrifying and perilous, ironically amusing or
annoyingly inconvenient – but this depends to some degree upon the person. Thus it is
reasonable to imagine examining situations from either one of these perspectives – or
both.
A number of researchers – notably, Magnusson (1981), Block (1981), Saucier,
Bel-Bahar & Fernandez (2006), and recently Gelfand (2007) – are in agreement that
situations may be addressed from different conceptual levels. Block calls these levels
physico-biological, canonical and subjective; Saucier, et al. calls them environmental,
consensual and functional; Gelfand simply calls them macro, meso, and micro – but all
these authors seem to be referring to the same or very similar three levels of analysis.
Level One: Macro/Physico-biological/Environmental. Early definitions of situation
were behavioral and based on learning theory: fragmenting the physical environment
into discrete, quantifiable stimuli examining the satisfying and bothersome effects of
environments. At this level – the broadest of the three - a situation is simply the raw
sensory information available to us, unfiltered by perception. According to Saucier, this
would include, for example, temperature, location, and number of people in the room;
for Block, this might also include physiological arousal. Gelfand describes this level as
including ecological, historical and socio-political factors. This level corresponds to
alpha press in its most rudimentary form, having removed all aspects of the social and
psychological world from consideration.
Level Two: Meso/Canonical/Consensual. This level of description refers to
properties of the situation that are consensual in a social, cultural and sociological way.
Situations at this level are described objectively (e.g., “funeral”, “argument”) and are
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9
selected and “structured to exclude certain [behavioral] possibilities and to emphasize
others” (Block, 1981, p. 87). Although this will vary from social group to social group,
region to region, and culture to culture, it provides possibly the most useful level at
which to conceptualize alpha press, being both objective and sufficiently encompassing
of sociocultural properties.
Level Three: Micro/Subjective/Functional. The micro/subjective/functional level
describes the psychological demand-properties of the situation as it registers on the
individual. This, then, is the level of situation that individuals subjectively experience
and react to and can be quite idiosyncratic. It is most closely relatable to Murray’s
notion of beta press.
Past attempts at Studying Situations
As mentioned earlier, one of the first things notable about the past literature on
situational assessment is its paucity relative to the intrinsic importance of the topic.
Only a few systematic efforts have been made to understand or classify situations.
Prior efforts have taken several approaches, which may be organized a loose
conceptual grouping of methodologies. The lexical approach – based on the hypothesis
that sufficiently important dimensions will have been represented in language (e.g.,
Goldberg, 1981) – has occasionally been used as a starting point for exploration into the
structure of situations. More frequently, an empirical approach is used, in which either
a) participants describe their probable feelings and behaviors in response to a list of
hypothetical situations, b) participants generate their own such lists, which are then
categorized by factor or cluster analysis, or c) researchers observe participants directly
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in terms of certain behaviors or their physical locations and then use these variables to
group situations. Finally, researchers have occasionally followed a theoretical
approach, building on some prior framework for understanding persons, situations, or
behaviors.
The Lexical Approach: One of the earliest examples of the lexical approach to
the study of situations was a study by Van Heck’s (1984), in which he combed the
dictionary for words that could be used to fill in the blank, “being confronted with a
_____ situation.” The resulting 263 terms were then rated and reduced to 10 factors
that included “interpersonal conflict,” “joint working,” and “recreation.” Edwards &
Templeton (2005) used a dictionary and a separate database to find 1039 words that
could complete the sentences “that situation was _____” or “that was a _____ situation.”
This list of words was reduced through factor analysis to four factors called positivity,
negativity, productivity, and “ease of negotiation.” Finally, a particularly interesting study
by Yang, Read and Miller (2006) applied the lexical approach to both Chinese idioms
and their English translations. Chinese idioms were chosen for their generally uniform
length (roughly 4 characters) and the surprisingly large number of them which refer to
situational properties. Examples of idioms used are “too late for regrets” and “catching
up from behind,” both of which can be seen to capture interesting psychological
properties of situations in an abstract manner. Native speakers of English and Chinese
both sorted the situation-idioms in their native languages. Yang, et al. reduced the
resulting data cluster analysis, finding good agreement between both Chinese and
American participants on 20 clusters of situations, all seeming to pertain in some way or
another to the means of attaining goals.
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The Empirical Approach: A number of early attempts at this approach resulted in
what might be termed “restricted-domain taxonomies” – that is to say, taxonomies
focused on particular responses or settings rather than being widely applicable. For
example, Endler, Hunt and Rosenstein (1962) used “stimulus-response” questionnaires
to ask participants, “how anxious would you be if _____?” Using this method, they
discovered what they felt were three kinds of situations that caused anxiety:
interpersonal situations, situations of inanimate danger (e.g., hurtling car, earthquake),
and ambiguous situations. However, if one is interested in situations for which anxiety
is not the most salient characteristic, this taxonomy becomes less helpful. Similarly,
Fredericksen (1972) analyzed executives’ responses to a weekend in-basket exercise,
resulting in a taxonomy of executive business situations with categories including
evaluation of procedures, routine problems, interorganizational problems, personnel
problems, policy issues, and time conflicts. Along similar lines, Magnusson (1971),
asked students to list all the situations they had encountered during academic study,
and then had all possible pairs rated for similarity. The resulting taxonomy spanned five
dimensions: positive and negative academic situations, passive and active academic
situations, and social academic situations.
Upon rare occasions, empirically-based studies of situations have taken the form
of researchers focusing on the first level of study (macro/physicobiological/environmental). By visiting psychiatric wards, student residences and
classrooms, Moos (1973) was able to develop scales to measure what he called
“perceived climate” based upon psychosocial features. He found three broad
dimensions he labeled “relationships,” (e.g., social support), “personal development,”
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(e.g., academic achievement) and “system maintenance/change” (e.g., order and
organization). Price and Bouffard (1974) used student diaries but focused on physical
location by categorizing situations based upon what they called “constraint” – the
number and kinds of behaviors that were considered appropriate within them. Among
the results was the finding that burping and fighting were inappropriate in almost any
location, whereas laughing was appropriate in almost all places; and that only a small
repertoire of behaviors were available to someone at church, while almost anything
went in someone’s own bedroom. The resulting taxonomy, unfortunately, resulted in
five difficult-to-interpret clusters labeled “park/sidewalk/football game,” “date/family
dinner/movie,” “bar/elevator/job interview/restroom” “class/church/bus,” and “dorm
lounge/own room.” Perhaps it is apparent why structuring a taxonomy of situations by
location is somewhat difficult.5
Researchers have sometimes asked participants to describe their hypothetical
feelings or behaviors in response to hypothetical situations: Forgas and Van Heck
(1992) used questionnaires to measure behavioral reactions in a series of situations
(e.g., “you are going to meet a new date”) and were then able to allocate the variance in
responses to persons, situations, and interactions. Vansteelandt and Van Mechelen
(1998) asked people about their reactions (mostly hostile) to situations classified as
“high frustrating,” “moderately frustrating,” and “low frustrating” (p. 761). ten Berge and
de Raad (2001) posit that situations are only useful in that they render the
understanding of traits less ambiguous, and thus asked students to write sentences
explicating how traits might be expressed in certain situations. They then grouped
5
Football game/sidewalk/park can be seen as a cluster of situations in which one might
“lounge,” “chatter,” or “recreate;” it is difficult and possibly unwise to speculate upon what
behaviors are equally appropriate in a restroom/job interview/bar.
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these sentences by meaning and structured them according to the likeliness of traitrelated behavior in them. For example, “Situations of adversity” arose from neuroticism,
“situations of enjoyment’ arose from extroversion, and “situations of positioning” arose
from conscientiousness.
Rather than asking participants to rate hypothetical situations, some investigators
have asked them instead to generate their own – such as Forgas (1976), who asked
housewives and students to provide two descriptions each for every interaction they had
experienced in the previous 24 hours. He found a two-dimensional episode structure
for housewives (intimacy/involvement and self-confidence) and a three-dimensional
structure for students (involvement, pleasantness, and knowing how to behave). Pervin
(1976) used the free-response descriptions of his participants of situations they had
experienced over the past year to create a taxonomy of daily situations. Using factor
analyses of the feelings and behaviors associated with these situations, he found
groups including home-family, friends-peers, relaxation-play, work-school, and alone.
Very rarely in this line of research are participants directly observed in actual
situations. A recent exception is Furr and Funder (2004), who asked participants to rate
the degree to which two experimental situations they had previously experienced
seemed similar – a measurement of what might be called beta press. In a second
study, they assessed the relative similarity of six experimental situations in objective
terms (based upon the similarity the task and participants involved), tapping alpha
press. Actual behavior, using the Riverside Behavioral Q-sort, was coded from
videotapes of the participants in each experimental situation. The first study found that
participants who saw the two experimental situations as more similar tended to be more
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consistent in their behavior across them. The second study found that participants were
more consistent in their behavior across pairs of situations that were more objectively
similar. These results demonstrate the importance of both alpha and beta press by
showing that behavior is more consistent across situations to the degree they are
similar in either sense.
The Theoretical Approach: Krause (1970) drew on sociological theory in an
attempt to categorize situations on theoretical grounds. Based upon the way in which
he posited that cultures assimilate novel situations into traditional, generic situations,
Krause suggested seven classes including joint working, fighting, and playing, among
others (a classification that guided the recovery of similar factors in the study by Van
Heck (1984) cited above.) In a major project based around interdependence theory, an
“Atlas” of interpersonal situations has recently been created. The Atlas is organized
around a set of 21 2 x 2 contingency tables akin to Prisoner’s Dilemma contexts (e.g.,
outcome is good for A but bad for B, good for B but bad for A, good for both, or bad for
both) (Kelley et al., 2003). The objective is to capture the ways in which the structure
of interpersonal interactions determines individual’s outcomes.
The Riverside Behavioral Q-sort
It is clear that research on situations is far from complete. To begin with, very
little consensus has been reached as to what the basic dimensions of situations are, or
how properties of situations might be reasonably described, or what counts as a
situation in the first place. Further, the comprehensiveness of prior studies is quite
uneven: many were limited to hypothetical situations rather than ones actually
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experienced, or to specific types of situations rather than situations in general. Finally,
the three pieces of the “triad” are hardly ever addressed in relation to each other: while
a very few studies have examined situations and behavior, they are usually limited to
what participants think they might do if… rather than what was actually done; likewise,
only a rare study has examined individual differences in the perception of and reaction
to situations.
This led to our current work with the Riverside Situational Q-Sort (RSQ;
Wagerman & Funder, 2007), an assessment tool built around the following assumptions
regarding the two main questions that have been posed in this chapter:
1) Can situations can ever be viewed independently from people’s perception of
them (or from the behaviors engaged in them, for that matter)? The answer, we
believe, must be a resounding “yes.” Indeed, interactions between people,
situations and behavior may only be studied successfully if they are kept
independent at the level of conceptualization and measurement (Reis, 2007).
Some might argue for a subjective or constructivist approach – that persons and
situations are fundamentally inseparable, thus rendering study of any one of
them difficult or impossible (Lewin, 1936; Johnson, 1999). However, such
arguments, while philosophically interesting, risk analytic and empirical paralysis.
As Asendorpf (this volume) notes, “subjective situations are confounded with
personality traits by definition of the situation” (p. 10 of ms., emphasis in the
original). If examination of the triad begins with two or even all three of its
threads already woven together, it will be impossible to use any measure thus
created as a situational predictor independent of the person or behavior. In fact,
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conceptualizing situations in terms of individual differences (e.g., an extravert
sees situation “X” in a particular way, while a shy person sees the same situation
in a completely different manner), effectively absorbs the study of situations into
the domain of personality psychology. In order to be equal partners with
personality variables in the prediction of behavior, situational variables need to
be distinguished from rather than merely mashed into them. There must be
something about the situation that is influential across both the shy and
extraverted person, or else social psychologists – and psychological
experimentalists in general – have been wrong all along.
2) At what level should situations be examined? Level One - the macro/physicobiological/environmental level - might have the advantage of being easily
clustered, but while such variables undoubtedly have their effect on behavior,
location clusters like those found by Price and Bouffard (1974), as discussed
earlier, seem behaviorally uninformative and unpsychological; the situation as it
affects human behavior must be more than its location or raw physical facts.
Studying situations at Level Three – the micro/subjective/functional level – has all
the problems contested above regarding the necessity of separating persons
from situations, and in behavioral analysis runs the risk of circularity. 6 A large
literature in cognitive psychology, however, suggests that among possible levels
of abstraction the most easily communicated and generally useful is the middle
or “basic” one (Rosch, 1973; Cantor & Mischel, 1977). Accordingly, it might be
best to aim research on the properties of situations at Level Two – the
For example, an individual’s hostile behavior might be “explained” on the basis of his or her
idiosyncratic perception of the situation as hostility-inducing.
6
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meso/canonical/consensual level of description, which is analogous to
personality description: while the traits of any given person are of psychological
interest, data is often aggregated across individuals in order to understand
people in general. In much the same way, any one subjective perception of a
situation, while psychologically interesting, can be forsaken by aggregating
across many such perceptions to arrive at some consensual and objective
description of what that situation’s properties are. While this approach still has
some limits – for example, as Asendorpf (this volume) notes, it may not be useful
in the study of intimate relationships – we still expect that it may prove to have a
wide range of applicability.
With these considerations in mind, we chose to develop a situationally
descriptive Q-sort tool (Funder, 2006; Wagerman & Funder, 2006). In a Q-sort, raters
sort descriptive items into a forced distribution, ranging in this case across 9 steps from
“highly uncharacteristic” of the situation being described (category 1) to “highly
characteristic” (category 9). For our instrument, dubbed the Riverside Situational Q-sort
(RSQ), the prescribed distribution of the 81 items (of the most recent version) across
the 9 categories is 3-6-10-14-15-14-10-6-3. This peaked, quasi-normal distribution,
commonly used in Q-technique (Block, 1961/1978) has three implications. First, all
items are judged against each other on the basis of how well (or poorly) they capture
the situation in question, rather than being rated on absolute scales. This aspect has
numerous advantages including forcing raters to make careful comparisons between
items that otherwise might be quickly and superficially deemed to be equally descriptive,
and lessening the influence of certain response sets, such as extremity. Second,
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almost exactly half of the items are placed in the middle three categories (4, 5 and 6),
which encourages raters to give relatively neutral ratings to terms that are not clearly
descriptive. Third, because of the small numbers of items allowed in the extreme
categories, rating an item as 1 or 2, or 8 or 9, amounts to a strong – and carefully
considered – statement about the relevance of that item for the situation in question. A
long history of theoretical development and empirical application of Q-technique shows
that these are important advantages, particular in cases where the ratings are difficult or
the object of the rating is complex (Block, 1961/1978).
Turning to item content, we drew upon a particular prior Q-Sort – the California Adult
Q-Sort (CAQ) – that has a good reputation as a widely-validated measure of
personality, and which we have used previously as the basis of behavioral Q-Sort items
– to provide a solid backbone for this endeavor. Each of the 100 CAQ items was
examined and converted into phraseology that described characteristics of situations
that afforded the opportunity for expression of each of the corresponding personality
characteristic. For example, the CAQ item, “is critical, skeptical, not easily impressed”
yielded the RSQ item, “someone is trying to impress someone or convince someone of
something” – the assumption here being that in a situation that is accurately described
by this property, a skeptical and critical person has an excellent opportunity to act
accordingly, whereas the opposite sort of person may instead reveal a penchant for
gullibility.7 Raters sort the RSQ items into a 9-step, forced distribution ranging from
“highly uncharacteristic” of the situation being described (category 1) to “highly
characteristic” (category 9).
7
Please visit www.rap.ucr.edu for the complete text of the current, 81-item incarnation of the
RSQ, as well as other relevant information and a freely-available computer program to facilitate
Q-sorting.
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Preliminary studies have shown promising results. In a pilot study, 81
undergraduates told us about a situation they had been in the previous day at a
randomly assigned time both qualitatively and using the RSQ. They also told us what
they had been feeling during this situation by way of the Positive and Negative Affect
Scale (PANAS; Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988) and what they had been doing during
the situation using a modified version of the RBQ that had been converted into a Likerttype rating scale. We also gathered personality data using the Big Five Inventory (BFI;
John, Donahue & Kentle, 1991). Thus armed with information about persons,
situations, emotions, and behavior, we have been able to examine some interesting
interactions among these variables. For example, when participants described the RSQ
item “P(articipant) is being insulted” as particularly characteristic of the situation they
had been in, they described themselves as having fantasized in response (r = 0.25;
about revenge, perhaps?), having been sarcastic (r = 0.25), and having blamed others
(r = 0.24). Many other patterns, interesting in this way, can be found in our preliminary
data. Other analyses examined the situational properties associated with the
experience of positive and negative affect, for example positive affect was found to be
associated with (among others) the potential for being complimented or praised (r =
0.41), presence of members of the opposite sex (r = 0.25), and a lack of potential
anxiety (r = -0.27) or a need to restrain one’s impulses (r = 0.25).
Further analyses of our preliminary data illustrated other enticing aspects of
situations. For example, male participants viewed the item “context includes stimuli that
may be construed sexually” as significantly more descriptive of whatever situations they
had been in than females did (whether this is a commentary on the types of situations
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that males and females seek or simply an indication that males are more likely to
ascribe sexual connotations to situational cues than are females – or a combination of
both! – is still up for interpretation). Our Latino participants perceived whatever
situations they had been in as significantly more affording of an opportunity to be
talkative than did our Asian participants; Caucasian participants described their
situations as significantly more enjoyable than did African-American participants.
The analyses of the associations between the situational variables, behavior and
personality using the RSQ – of which the ones summarized above are just a tiny sample
– encouraged us to conclude that aspects of real-life situations can be reliably and
meaningfully described with such an instrument, and that the properties it captures are
related to behavior, emotional experience, and personality, and perhaps even gender
and cultural background. Research is continuing.
Future Directions
A developing technology for situational assessment has the potential to open
many research doors. While studies so far have mostly focused on mundane, everyday
situations recently experienced by our participants, extreme situations (e.g.,
emergencies, crises), even if rare, can be consequential and revealing of personality,
and deserve to be considered in future work. Future research should also include direct
observations of behavior in experimental situations designed to accentuate selected
situational dimensions. More broadly, perhaps the wide range of experimental
situations studied by social psychology could be conceptualized in terms of standard
descriptive variables such as those offered by the RSQ, allowing their effects on
Situations
21
behavior (to the extent they have the same or related dependent variables) to be
systematized across the literature, for the first time. This move towards systemization
could help promote a new symbiosis between personality and social psychology
(Swann & Seyle, 2005), by permitting “the effect of the situation” long studied by social
psychologists to be analyzed in terms of the same kinds of general variables long used
within personality psychology to conceptualize the effects of persons (Funder & Ozer,
1983). Another important purpose of for situational variables could be to examine
within-person variability in behavior as a function of situational variation, thus
simultaneously addressing behavioral change as well as consistency (Fleeson, 2004).
In applied contexts, a technology for situational assessment offers possibilities for
predicting the specific situations under which people, or certain kinds of people, or even
people with certain genotypes, are likely to lose their temper, engage in criminal
behavior, perform jobs well, or live longer (cf. Caspi et al., 2002; Moffitt, 2005). Different
people thrive and suffer in different situations, a fact that could make a developed
science of situational assessment useful for enhancing the individualized selection and
design of workplace, educational, and general life contexts to promote mental and
physical health and the attainment of important individual goals.
Situations
22
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