Behavior has strong and wide-ranging ties to personality, but what people do is also greatly influenced by the situation. This project addresses situational construal, which has two facets: differences in how individuals perceive and react to the same situation, and differences between the actual nature of a situation and how an individual perceives it. According to the Situational Construal Model (SCM), the objective nature of a situation and personality jointly determine how an individual construes a situation and the way he or she responds to it.
To assess the objective and perceived properties of situations, the project uses the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ), an instrument developed in the investigator's lab. They will gather observations of behavior in the laboratory in order to advance beyond previous research in three ways: (1) Perceptions of each situation will be compared among participants in it. (2) Direct observation will allow researchers to make objective ratings of both the situational features and participants? behaviors. (3) The effect of evocation (an individual?s effect on the situation) will be separated from selection (the tendency of individuals to self-select into particular situations).
The potential broader impacts of this research include improved understanding of the life contexts in which particular individuals suffer or thrive, and the ways in which psychopathology may be associated with situational misperception. For outreach, the project Website provides access to research results and free downloads of computer programs that facilitate Q-sorting and randomization analyses. The educational impact includes the training of graduate students and undergraduate research assistants. UC Riverside is a designated Minority Serving Institution (MSI) and Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI); thus the project promotes the inclusion of members of under-represented groups as researchers.
