The Concept of Situations

The concept of situations has a long past, but the conceptualization of situations only has a short history. This article provides a survey of the concept of situations. Based upon Milgram’s [Human Relations 18 (1965), 57] vision toward ‘a compelling theory of situations,’ the authors examine the concept of situations in three specific literatures: definitions of situations, taxonomies of situations, and interrelationships among persons, situations, and behaviors. To further integrate the literature, the authors propose that the essence of a situation is its affordance of human goals, and that situations are largely characterized by two specific principles of goal processes (what happened, is happening, or might happen to people’s goals) and goal contents (the specific goals afforded in the situation). Every day, humans readily infer that they are in one situation or another. Yet, situation is one of the most elusive concepts in the study of human behavior. Today, there is growing consensus, in personality psychology (Funder, 2006), social psychology (Reis, 2008), organizational behavior (Johns, 2006), and sociology (Seeman, 1997) that our conceptualization of situations has been inadequate. This lack of an adequate conceptualization is forestalling long-term progress in deeply understanding the dynamic interactions among persons, situations, and behavior critical for interdisciplinary work (Rozin, 2001). Recently, a growing number of researchers have begun to address the need for strong theoretical and empirical work on situations (e.g., Edwards & Templeton, 2005; Funder, 2006, 2008, 2009; Furr, 2009; Furr & Funder, 2004; Heller, Perunovic, & Reichman, 2009; Kelley et al., 2003; Saucier, Bel-Bahar, & Fernandez, 2007; Wagerman & Funder, In press; Yang, Read, & Miller, 2006). The Journal of Personality devoted a special issue to personality and its situational manifestations (Roberts, 2007). Also in 2007, Harry Reis devoted his presidential address to ‘reinvigorating the concept of situation’ at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) (Reis, 2008). In 2008, the annual meeting of SPSP included a symposium entitled ‘Towards a psychology of situations,’ and the biennial meeting of the European Association of Personality Psychology invited a similar symposium on ‘Situations and behavior.’ Furthermore, in 2009, the Journal of Research in Personality devoted a special issue to the legacy of the person–situation debate and the integration of persons and situations (Donnellan, Lucas, & Fleeson, 2009). It is time to again take up the gauntlet thrown down more than 40 years ago by social psychologist Stanley Milgram: Ultimately, social psychology would like to have a compelling theory of situations which will, first, present a language in terms of which situations can be defined; proceed to a typology of situations; and then point to the manner in which definable properties of situations are transformed into psychological forces in the individual. (Milgram, 1965, p. 74) Social and Personality Psychology Compass 3/6 (2009): 1018–1037, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2009.00236.x a 2009 The Authors Journal Compilation a 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Following Milgram’s road map, this article provides an overview of three sets of literatures on situations: (1) definitions of situations, which underlie a common language of situations, (2) taxonomies of situations, which identify the major features and types of situations and allow us to distinguish one situation from the next, and (3) investigations of the interrelationships among persons, situations, and behaviors, which pinpoint how the properties of situations are transformed into psychological forces in the individual. Our goal is to facilitate the ongoing discussion of conceptualizing situations. We close this article with a goal-based perspective that may synthesize the literatures, stimulate new ideas of conceptualizing situations, and broaden our understanding of human behavior. Definitions of Situations Before we introduce the ways in which situations have been defined, it is worthwhile to distinguish situation from related concepts such as stimulus and environment. All three terms have been used interchangeably to refer to the external conditions surrounding human activities. However, situation differs from the other two in both the levels of analysis and disciplinary foci. In terms of levels of analysis, situation is typically conceptualized at the intermediate level, while stimulus is at the micro level concerned with a specific object that gives rise to the organism’s response (Sells, 1963), and environment is at the macro level concerned with the aggregate of larger physical and psychological conditions that influence human behaviors (Wapner & Demick, 2002). Thus, the concept of situations can be considered at the level between stimulus and environment, such that a stimulus may be a part of a situation, and a situation may be a part of the environment. An empirical relationship established at the level of situations to behaviors may or may not be replicated at the levels of stimulus or environment to behaviors (Roberts & Pomerantz, 2004). In terms of disciplinary foci, then, situation tends to be a focus for personality and social psychologists, stimulus tends to be a focus for cognitive psychologists, and environment tends to be a focus for environmental psychologists (Endler, 1982), although personality and social psychologists have recently developed renewed interests in understanding the role of physical environment in person–environment interactions (e.g., Milgram, 1970; Miyamoto, Nisbett, & Masuda, 2006; Rentfrow, Gosling, & Potter, 2008). In this article, we consider the concept of situations in its broadest sense and discuss research related not just to the traditionally conceived situation, but also to environment and, occasionally, stimulus. We have also considered other terms, such as personal context, social episodes, scripts, situational frames, and behavioral settings as variants of the concept of situations. It is our hope that this broad treatment would be most beneficial to further conceptualizations of situations. Psychologists have defined situations in terms of two relatively distinct aspects: psychological versus ecological environments (Barker, 1987), social versus physical situations (Endler, 1982), psychological versus biological environment (Kantor, 1924, 1926), behavioral versus geographical environment (Koffka, 1935), perceived versus actual situations (Magnusson, 1981a), alpha versus beta press (Murray, 1938), and subjective versus objective situations (Stebbins, 1967, 1969). Some definitions have emphasized the idiosyncratic nature of situations. Little (2000), for instance, defined ‘personal contexts’ as ‘‘the idiosyncratically construed objects, situations, settings, and circumstances of our daily lives’’ (p. 93). Krahé (1990) defined ‘situation cognition’ as the process of ‘‘individuals’ attempt to establish the meaning of situations in a subjectively accurate way’’ (p. 12). Pervin (1976, 1982, 1992) suggested The Concept of Situations 1019 a 2009 The Authors Social and Personality Psychology Compass 3/6 (2009): 1018–1037, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2009.00236.x Journal Compilation a 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd that individuals not only have distinctive patterns of perceiving situations, they also have distinctive ways to consider what counts as a situation. Other definitions have emphasized the culturally construed nature of situations. Argyle, Furnham, and Graham (1981), for instance, defined a situation as ‘‘a type of social encounter with which members of a culture or subculture are familiar’’ (p. 4). Abelson (1981) defined ‘script’ as the ‘‘conceptual representations of stereotyped event sequences’’ (p. 715). Furthermore, Read and Miller (1998) argued that situations are concepts that economically instantiate the gist of culturally recurring episodes or stories. Thus, situations can be generally defined as a combination of the individually interpreted, implicit, and unique understandings, and the culturally shared, explicit, and common understandings of the surroundings that produce and constrain human behavior. As illustrated in the social cognitive theory of personality, Mischel and colleagues argued that psychological situations ‘‘capture basic psychological features or ingredients that occur in many different nominal situations and settings’’ (Shoda, Mischel, & Wright, 1994, p. 675), and that nominal situations are ‘‘dictated by the structure of the particular ecology (the setting), rather than by their potential psychological impact on, and meaning for, the person or by the generalizability of the observations obtained within them’’ (Shoda et al., 1994, p. 675). Taxonomies of Situations Swann and Seyle (2005) recently argued for ‘‘the development of a comprehensive taxonomy of situations – a development that has been pursued with stunningly modest success since H. Wright and Barker’s (1950) early attempt’’ (p. 162). In this section, we evaluate a variety of empirically based situation taxonomies that focused on the major features and types of situations in relatively broad domains (cf., Baumeister & Tice, 1985; Block & Block, 1981; Frederiksen, 1972; Insel & Moos, 1974; Moos, 1973; Ten Berge & De Raad, 1999). Taxonomies that focused on relatively restricted domains (e.g., situations of anxiousness, Endler, Hunt, & Rosenstein, 1962; situations of conflict, Pinkley, 1990), or on the physical attributes of the environment (e.g., molar physical environments, Ward & Russell, 1981; environmental scenes, Tversky & Hemenway, 1983) are not discussed. It is also important to note that, similar to the distinction in the prototype analysis of objects (Rosch, 1978), emotions (Fehr & Russell, 1984), person categories (Cantor & Mischel, 1979), and situation categories (Cantor, Mischel, & Schwartz, 1982), there are two basic kinds of situation taxonomies. The first kind is intended to capture the major features (or attributes, characteristics, qualities, and dimensions) of situations. The second kind is intended to capture the major types (or groups, clusters, classes, and categories) of the situations themselves. Across these taxonomies, there is a common three-step methodological procedure. First, a sampling pool of the features of situations, or situations themselves, is selected. Second, interrelations among the features of situations, the situations themselves, or between situations and features of situations are empirically established. Third, the major features or types of situations are identified using data reduction methods such as cluster analysis, factor analysis, and multidimensional scaling. Table 1 summarizes the results of these taxonomies and how they were conducted. To better synthesize this literature, in what follows, we have organized these taxonomies not necessarily in terms of when they were constructed, but in terms of how they complement each other methodologically and conceptually. We first describe the kinds of taxonomies conducted in three major 1020 The Concept of Situations a 2009 The Authors Social and Personality Psychology Compass 3/6 (2009): 1018–1037, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2009.00236.x Journal Compilation a 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd T a b le 1 Ta xo n o m ie s o f Si tu at io n s B as ed u p o n Em p ir ic al R es ea rc h S tu d y S a m p le o f S it u a ti o n s S a m p le s o f