Renovating Situation Taxonomies: Exploring the Construction and Content of Fundamental Motive Situation Types

Abstract

The present work demonstrates a method for constructing theoretically based situational classifications and exploring their behavioral implications. Fundamental motives theory (FMT; Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg, & Schaller, 2010; Kenrick, Neuberg, Griskevicius, Becker, & Schaller, 2010) proposes that humans have evolved seven specific social motives that would be differentially evoked by different situations. Experts in FMT used the Riverside Situational Q‐sort (RSQ) to describe prototypic motive‐relevant situations and the Riverside Behavioral Q‐sort (RBQ) to construct templates representing predictions of how people would behave in them. A sample of 201 undergraduate participants used the RSQ to describe situations they had experienced within the past 24 hours, and they described their behavior in each situation using the RBQ. For both the RSQ and RBQ, self‐protection and disease avoidance templates were highly similar to each other and different from mate‐seeking and affiliation templates. Participants more often reported experiencing situations similar to the mate‐seeking, affiliation, and kin care templates and less often reported experiencing situations similar to the self‐protection and disease avoidance templates. Participants' reported behavior was consistent with expectations from FMT. This study illustrates how relations between situations and behavior can be illuminated through the use of theoretically derived templates.

Principles of Situation Research: Towards a Better Understanding of Psychological Situations

“…To date, van Heck's () taxonomy remains the most inclusive and prominent among them, with 10 dimensions: conflict, joint working, intimacy/relationships, recreation, travelling, rituals, sport, excesses, serving and trading. More recently, Morse, Neel, et al (in press) classified situations in terms of seven motives identified as essential in evolutionary theory: self‐protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, kin care, mate seeking, mate retention, and status.…”

“…Thus, one can obtain classes from characteristics (e.g. by latent class analyses of DIAMONDS profiles; template matching: Morse, Neel, et al, in press), but going the other direction from classes to characteristics is problematic because characteristics can then only be inferred and not empirically derived. Finally, categorical approaches leave us wanting more.…”

“…with ‘Yes/No’ checklists) is too limiting, although deriving classes from profiles of situation characteristics may be useful in examining theoretically relevant situation classes (e.g. from an evolutionary perspective: Morse, Neel, et al, in press).…”

Navigating Interdependent Social Situations

“…Unfortunately, there is little descriptive work on the forms of interdependence that are more frequently encountered in people's daily lives. Yet this type of empirical approach has been fruitfully applied in recent studies to identify, classify, and understand which situations are psychologically important in real-world settings (e.g., Brown, Neel, & Sherman, 2015;Morse, Neel, Todd, & Funder, 2015;Parrigon, Woo, Tay, & Wang, 2016;Rauthmann et al, 2014). can similarly be used to study the common types of interdependence that people experience daily.…”

“…Various lines of empirical research have resulted in different taxonomies of situations according to their basic characteristics (e.g., Edwards & Templeton, 2005;Morse et al, 2015;Parrigon et al, 2016;Rauthmann et al, 2014;Yang, Read, & Miller, 2009). Recently, Gerpott and colleagues (2017) examined the relations between interdependence perceptions (i.e., SIS dimensions) and perceptions in terms of a newly developed situation taxonomy-the DIAMONDS-which includes eight dimensions of fundamental situation characteristics (Duty, Intellect, Adversity, Mating, pOsitivity, Negativity, Deception, and Sociality; Rauthmann et al, 2014).…”