UC Riverside

Strong situations are those that constrain the influence that personality has on behavior. Despite situation strength’s position at the intersection of personality and social psychology, the field’s take on the construct remains unclear and understudied. The current research, motivated by the need to take situation strength seriously, aims to quantify multiple definitions of situation strength, as well as explore the properties of strong situations, in order to better understand the construct’s defining properties and provide some structure to its study. In the present study, participants were recruited to interact in multiple situations with unacquainted others. Following each interaction, participants described their construal of the situation, and observers of the interactions provided descriptions of the situations as well as descriptions of participants’ behavior. Given these data, I quantified situation strength by calculating the extent to which participants construed these situations, and behaved in these situations, similarly to one another. I also explored the psychological properties of strong situations. Contrary to popular assumptions in the situation strength literature, the results suggest that the construal agreement and behavior similarity definitions of situation strength are not interchangeable, such that participants who construed situations similarly to others did not necessarily behave similarly to others. Additionally, across definitions of situation strength, it appears as though strong situations often contain positive psychological properties whereas weak situations often contain negative psychological properties. The present work provides a novel approach to the study and quantification of situation strength and, as a result, provides insights that should guide future thinking and research on the topic.