Situations can be seen as having attributes or qualities in much the same way as people have traits. The structure of people's perceptions of these situation qualities was explored. A comprehensive list of adjectives that might describe situations was generated, and people rated situations using samples of the words. Across several samples of words and participants and several analytic methods, four factors show up regularly (positivity, negativity, productivity, and ease of negotiation). In a second study, it was shown that these factors predict the way in which people freely sort situations. The conceptual nature of these factors and of situation qualities is discussed, with particular emphasis on how people's goals and perceived outcomes influence their perceptions of situations. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.The concept of the situation has long held a central place in social and personality psychology. It is traditional in these fields to divide the forces that influence behaviour into those internal to the person, such as personality traits and motivations, and those residing in the external situation, such as social norms or environmental cues. A great deal of comprehensive descriptive and taxonomic work has been done on the 'internal' factors (see John & Srivastava, 1999, for a review). There is also a large literature on how people perceive these internal factors in others (for an overview, see Gilbert, 1998). There is less work of this sort regarding situations. Situational variables do, of course, serve as important variables in a large number of social psychological studies, but almost always in terms of a specific factor thought to impact upon some other variable or process of interest. It is rare that the situation itself and the perception of it are the focus of study.Comprehensive descriptive studies of situations do exist (for examples, see Magnusson, 1981), as do studies of the perception of situations (e.g. Cantor, Mischel, & Schwartz, 1982;Champagne & Pervin, 1987;Forgas, 1976). Unfortunately, much of this work exists outside of the mainstream of social psychology, the field typically most associated with situational factors. Recently, Funder (2001), Hogan and Roberts (2000), and Rozin (2001) all criticized social psychology for lacking a taxonomy of social situations (cf. Asch, 1952;Frederickson, 1972;Pervin, 1978;Rozin, 2001 have been notable exceptions to this trend (e.g. Argyle, Furnham, & Graham, 1981;Kelley et al., 2003), 1 but it is probably noncontroversial to say that social psychology lacks a generally accepted taxonomy of situations. The importance of this type of descriptive work for social psychology has been discussed at length by Rozin (2001).Much of the taxonomic work that has been done on situations has been conducted by personality psychologists (and by researchers working in environmental and organizational psychology). Personality psychologists realized in the 1970s that the expression of personality traits and other human attributes depends in part on the...
