The Riverside Situational Q-sort

Social psychology studies the impact of situational variables on behavior but has developed few methods to describe these variables. The Riverside Situational Q-Sort (RSQ; Funder, 2016; Wagerman & Funder, 2009) is the first validated tool developed to assess the psychological characteristics of situations. The RSQ allows for the quantification and comparison of a broad range of situations and has as such been used to examine laboratory situations, situations experienced in daily life, situational similarity, and the experience of situations across cultures. Situational descriptions can be provided by self-report (i.e., construal) or detached observers, and these situational ratings can be associated with aspects of personality or used to predict behavioral outcomes. Theoretically derived RSQ templates can also be used to describe idealized types of situations to which experienced or reported situations can be compared. The RSQ continues to undergo development and refinement as its use is extended into ever-broader applications.

The Psychological Characteristics of Situations: Towards an Integrated Taxonomy

Much current research on situations, instead of attending to single situation cues or abstract classes of situations, focuses on characteristics which capture the psychological meaning and interpretation of a situation. This focus allows a differential psychology of situations where any situation can be described and compared with a set of continuous dimensions (much like how persons can be described by traits). We provide an overview of extant taxonomies of situation characteristics and highlight their convergences. Several taxonomies—independently developed from different research teams with different item pools, samples, and data-analytic methods—have provided psychometrically validated measurement tools which make it possible to associate the (scales of the) taxonomies with one another. Upon examining the conceptual and empirical overlaps between those taxonomies, six replicable domains of situation characteristics can be identified: threat, stress, tasks, processing, fun, and mundane. These domains bear in content a striking resemblance to the Big Five or HEXACO dimensions of personality traits. We sketch how theory, methods, and research on situations may make further progress, especially regarding the goal of crafting an integrative and inclusive taxonomy of situation characteristics.

The Use of Virtual Reality for Understanding Situations

This chapter summarizes and evaluates experimental approaches to situational research with an emphasis on virtual reality (VR). First, it outlines different methods to partition variance in person and situation perception and to highlight the advantages of experimental studies as a fixed-effect design. Next, the chapter weighs the merits of some commonly employed methods to standardize situations in experimental settings. The core of the chapter is devoted to VR. After a brief historical and conceptual introduction, it discusses the value of VR as a research tool in terms of internal and external validity. Subsequently, it shows how VR can aid the study of person-situation interactions by using a virtual replication of Stanley Milgram’s conformity study. Finally, it reviews recent studies that have pushed the boundaries of VR and enumerates the challenges yet to be overcome in the field. In sum, the chapter aims to provide a succinct and encouraging primer on the use of VR for situation research.

Cross-Cultural Assessment of Situational Experience

Cross-cultural psychology can benefit from the incorporation of psychological situations and the investigation of how cultural influences are manifested in our daily lives. In this chapter, we review the current literature on cross-cultural assessments of situations under the framework of cues (objective attributes of a situation), characteristics (meaning or interpretation of cues), and classes (groups of situations based on cues or characteristics). Cultural situational cues, such as the weather or population density, vary both in frequency and in interpretation across countries. Characteristics of situations differ in the meaning individuals ascribe to cues, the affective response to situations based on culture socialization, and the amount of agency or autonomy perceived in situations. Lastly, classes of situations (e.g., education settings, the workplace, romantic relationships), provide a useful method of grouping common situations for understanding cultural differences.

The Ecological Rationality of Situations

The study of situations involves asking how people behave in particular environmental settings, often in terms of their individual personality differences. The ecological rationality research program explains people’s behavior in terms of the specific decision-making tools they select and use from their mind’s adaptive toolbox when faced with specific types of environment structure. These two approaches can be integrated to provide a more precise mapping from features of situation structure to decision heuristics used and behavioral outcomes. This chapter presents three examples illustrating research on ecological rationality and its foundations, along with initial directions for incorporating it into an integrated situation theory.

What Neuroscience Can Tell Us about Social Situations

The goal of this chapter is to highlight how neuroimaging techniques can complement behavioral approaches for understanding situations. The chapter describes three situational contexts relevant to applying these techniques to study situational contexts. First, it considers the neuroimaging environment itself as situational context and delineates unique features of this environment that can impact subjective experience. Second, it reviews methodological trends for eliciting situational experiences in a neuroimaging environment, particularly in the domain of interpersonal interactions. Third, it discusses recent neuroimaging evidence suggesting that diverse social situations share common underlying neural responses. The chapter highlights how manipulating an individual’s construal of a situation can provide additional insights into the neurobiology of positive and negative situations. Together, neuroimaging approaches can provide one organizing principle for the vast constellation of situations. The hope is to encourage researchers to apply these approaches to gain novel and complementary insights into situational experience.

Culture’s Constraints

Research on culture has generally ignored social situations, and research on social situations has generally ignored culture. In bringing together these two traditions, we show that nations vary considerably in the strength of social situations, and this is a key conceptual and empirical bridge between macro and distal cultural processes and micro and proximal psychological processes. The model thus illustrates some of the intervening mechanisms through which distal societal factors affect individual processes. It also helps to illuminate why cultural differences persist at the individual level, as they are adaptive to chronic differences in the strength of social situations. The strength of situations across cultures can provide new insights into cultural differences in a wide range of psychological processes.

Assessment of Situational Perceptions

The assessment of situations and especially situational perceptions is the focus of this chapter. Based on the ABC principles of test construction (Ziegler, 2014b) and the road map to the taxonomization of situations (Rauthmann, 2015), this chapter shows how situational taxonomies and their assessment tools can be developed. These principles are exemplified by presenting three recent situational taxonomies and the effect different approaches have on the resulting taxonomy. Similarities and differences to established taxonomies of personality traits (such as the Big Five) are discussed. Furthermore, a new taxonomy and assessment tool is presented that captures personality traits and situational perception at the same time. Finally, challenges of future situational taxonomization, especially the need to establish a nomological net of situational perception and other, related constructs and psychological processes, are discussed.

Naturalistic Assessment of Situations Using Mobile Sensing Methods

The assessment of psychological situations in everyday life presents a number of methodological challenges, largely stemming from the need to assess situations as they occur in their natural context. Digital media devices (e.g., smartphones, wearables, smart home appliances) that come equipped with a wide array of sensors address these challenges by making it possible to measure objective information about situations, many times, with great fidelity, over long periods of time, in a way that is both unobtrusive and ecologically valid. This chapter provides an overview of mobile sensing methods (MSMs) and describes how they can be used to capture objective information about situational cues (e.g., social interactions, objects, activities, locations, time). It then describes opportunities for psychological research using MSMs to provide insights into everyday situational cues, characteristics, and classes. It concludes by discussing some of the practical considerations and challenges associated with using MSMs to assess situations.

Situational Strength Theory

The notion that individual differences (e.g., personality traits) predict behavior and relevant outcomes in “weak” situations (i.e., when people are left to their own devices to determine what to do) but not in “strong” situations (i.e., when situations provide people with unmistakable cues about what to do) is often treated as a truism among psychologists (Cooper & Withey, 2009). Although many studies support this general idea, its intuitive appeal may have dissuaded researchers from treating situational strength as a meaningful construct in its own right. This chapter attempts to remedy this state of affairs by (a) proposing a formalized theory of situational strength that outlines this construct’s functional mechanisms, (b) demonstrating how this knowledge can be used to develop testable hypotheses (e.g., pertaining to the criterion-oriented validity of individual differences), and (c) exploring several theoretical and practical implications of this theory for both science and practice.