While the person-situation debate was largely based on a misunderstanding of the magnitude of the correlations that characterize relations between personality traits and behavior, it drew muchneeded attention to the importance of situations. However, few attempts have been made to understand the important elements of situations in relation to behavior. Current work developing the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ) aims to provide a useful way to conceptualize and measure the behaviorally important attributes of situations. A current project is applying this method cross-culturally. New data from the US and Japan show that behavioral correlates of two elements of the situation -the presence of a member of the opposite sex and the experience of being criticized by others -have largely similar behavioral correlates between genders and across cultures. These analyses illustrate how the RSQ illuminates the connections between situations and behavior. Future research will extend such analyses to more situational attributes and other cultures around the world. Keywords: personality, situations, behaviors, cross-cultural research PERSONS AND SITUATIONS 3The Person-situation Debate and the Assessment of Situations Personality traits determine behavior, but what people do also depends critically on the situation. The relative importance of these two influences has long been a contentious issue in personality psychology (Kenrick & Funder, 1988). The first purpose of the present article will be to briefly survey the current state of this debate. Ironically, despite the frequent claims about the importance of situations -especially in comparison to the importance of personality -very little progress has been made over the years in identifying and assessing the specific aspects of situations that make them psychologically important. Therefore, the second part of this article will describe a new research program aiming to improve the conceptualization and psychological assessment of situations, presenting current work considering how the effects of situations on behaviors might be the same or different across diverse cultures around the world. The Person-Situation DebateThe "person-situation debate" was long and complex, and we will not attempt to review all of its history here. Instead, we simply point to one its landmarks, which was the publication of Mischel's (1968) volume Personality and Assessment including the following passage: "…the phrase 'personality coefficient' might be coined to describe the correlation between .20 and .30… when virtually any personality dimension inferred from a questionnaire is related to almost any… external criterion" (Mischel, 1968, p. 78). PERSONS AND SITUATIONS 4This viewpoint became known as the "situationist" position (Bowers, 1973). A fellowadherent to this position, Richard Nisbett, later raised the putative limit for the predictive power of personality to about r = .40 (Nisbett, 1980, p. 124). The claim of such a limit to the predictive power of personality immediately raises ...