Sherman, Ryne A.

Situations are important in relation to behavior and personality (Lewin, 1946, 1951; Ross & Nisbett, 1991; Zimbardo, 2007). However, historical studies of situations have suffered from disagreement about their structure. The Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ: Wagerman & Funder, 2009) was developed as a tool to comprehensively measure situation characteristics. Because the RSQ is still relatively new, the factor structure of the RSQ has yet to be examined. Identifying the factor structure of the RSQ is important in order to provide an interpretation of the dimensions of situations and to make the first step in creating a smaller measure of situation characteristics that takes less time for participants to complete. Using a variety of factor extraction methods, 9 factors appeared consistently: Adversity, Social Negativity, Obligation, Cognitive/Intellectual, Mate Attraction, Sensuous, Positivity, and Competition. This study provides in-depth insight into the characteristics of situations based on a quantitative measure from an adult sample.

Theoretical models posit that the perception of situations consists of two
components: an objective component attributable to the situation being perceived and a
subjective component attributable to the person doing the perceiving (Murray, 1938;
Rauthmann, 2012; Sherman, Nave & Funder, 2013; Wagerman & Funder, 2009). In this
study participants (N = 186) viewed three pictures from the Thematic Apperception Test
(TAT; Murray, 1938) and rated the situations contained therein using a new measure of
situations, the Riverside Situational Q-Sort (RSQ; Wagerman & Funder, 2009). The RSQ
was used to calculate the overall agreement among ratings of situations and to examine
the objective and subjective properties of the pictures. These results support a twocomponent
theory of situation perception. Both the objective situation and the person perceiving that situation contributed to overall perception. Further, distinctive perceptions of situations were consistent across pictures and were associated with the Big Five personality traits in a theoretically meaningful manner. For instance, individuals high in Openness indicated that these pictures contained comparatively more humor (r = .26), intellectual stimuli (r = .20), and raised moral or ethical issues (r = .19) than individuals low on this trait.