The purpose of this research is to quantitatively compare everyday situational experience around the world. Local collaborators recruited 5,447 members of college communities in 20 countries, who provided data via a Web site in 14 languages. Using the 89 items of the Riverside Situational Q‐sort (RSQ), participants described the situation they experienced the previous evening at 7:00 p.m. Correlations among the average situational profiles of each country ranged from r = .73 to r = .95; the typical situation was described as largely pleasant. Most similar were the United States/Canada; least similar were South Korea/Denmark. Japan had the most homogenous situational experience; South Korea, the least. The 15 RSQ items varying the most across countries described relatively negative aspects of situational experience; the 15 least varying items were more positive. Further analyses correlated RSQ items with national scores on six value dimensions, the Big Five traits, economic output, and population. Individualism, Neuroticism, Openness, and Gross Domestic Product yielded more significant correlations than expected by chance. Psychological research traditionally has paid more attention to the assessment of persons than of situations, a discrepancy that extends to cross‐cultural psychology. The present study demonstrates how cultures vary in situational experience in psychologically meaningful ways.

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 ...

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Cultural psychology brings back to psychology the crucial role of historywhich leads to the need for new methodology. Such methodology needs to fit the nature of phenomena-which in psychology are of open systemic nature. Cultural phenomena are historical at all levels: personal (personal life histories), that of society (history of any given society) and at the level of the microgenesis of actions. Such historicity renders a number of habitual empirical practices-such as random sampling and generalization from samples to populations-inappropriate for science. Despite the tradition in psychology of that treats-random sampling‖ as normative for science, we show that it constitutes a conceptual dead-end street that moves psychology away from adequate strategies of generalization. Psychology at large can follow the lead of cultural psychology and look at individual cases as systemically organized within themselves, generalizing from such systemic organization of particulars to generic systemic models of the phenomena, with subsequent empirical testing of these models in selected new individual cases. We show the importance of the selection of individual cases for the study through consideration of their historical trajectories moving through a common temporary state (equifinality point). Some of these equifinality points are obligatory-set by the phylogeny of the species or by collective cultural construction. number of forms (see Table 1). Table 1. Different notions of Sampling in the social sciences Random: a sample of objects is selected for study from a larger group (called population). Each object is chosen by procedures that are designated to be random-it is-by chance‖ that the objects are selected. Each object in the population has an equal chance of being selected into the sample. Within that sampling mode sub-types exist: cluster sampling (population is divided into clusters, followed by random selection of the clusters), or independent sampling (samples selected from population are mutually free of affecting one another). Representative: The act of selection is based on the proportional representativeness of the objects in the population. The sample includes a comparable cross-section of varied backgrounds that are present in the population. Sub-types are stratified sampling (first divide the population into subgroups , then select from these groups) and matched sampling (each object in one group is matched with a counterpart in another) Theoretical: the underlying theory if the researcher determines whom to select for the study. Our new introduction-HSS-belongs here. Practice based: A practitioner-a clinical psychologist, teacher, nurse-who wants to do research on their field and experience treats his or her clients as research subjects. Ethical protections of subjects' rights are in place, but the agreement by persons to participate is set up within the field of their indebtedness to the researcher as the provider of some other practically needed services. One-point breakthrough. Even if researchers hope ...