Project Description : The Construal of Situations Page

For some the world is a hostile place where men are evil and dangerous; for others it is a stage for fun and frolic. It may appear as a place to do one's duty grimly; or a pasture for cultivating friendship and love. Behavior has strong and wide-ranging ties to personality, but what people do is also greatly influenced by the situation. This fact highlights an important historical imbalance in the basic scientific foundation of psychology. For decades, numerous investigators have focused on conceptualizing and quantifying psychological differences between individuals, and a large research literature offers literally thousands of tools for personality assessment. These tools can, in turn, be used to predict behaviors and important life outcomes The assessment of situations has lagged far behind. Even researchers who argue for their central importance often neglect to specify the psychologically active ingredients that give situations their power. Instead, the argument has too often been made by subtraction, assuming that whatever behavioral variance is not accounted for a by a particular personality variable must be due to the situation (Funder & Ozer, 1983). This state of affairs has begun to change only relatively recently, with investigators drawing renewed attention to the importance of conceptualizing situations (Reis, 2008) and beginning to develop tools for situational assessment (Sherman, Nave & Funder, in press). One reason why research may have historically shied away from investigating situations is that it must confront a difficult conceptual question. Where do situations exist: in the objective world or in the eye of the beholder? On the one hand, the best direct evidence that situations are important consists of experimental social psychology's many demonstrations of properties that affect all people in the same way or, at very least, enough people in the same way as to generate statistically significant findings. Indeed, the assumption that objective aspects of situations yield predictable behavioral results is built into every interpretation of a significant mean difference between an experimental and control condition. On the other hand, every situation is inevitably filtered through the perceptions of each person who experiences it (Reis, 2008). As Mischel (1977, p. 253) observed, " any given, objective stimulus condition may have a variety of effects, depending on how the individual construes and transforms it " and Bem and Allen (1974, p. 518) went so far as to claim that " the classification of situations…will have to be in terms …