Psychologists have a long and successful history of conceptualizing and measuring individual differences to predict and understand behavior.  However, behavior does not occur in a vacuum and what behaviors are appropriate depends on the situations that people encounter. We know surprisingly little about how people perceive and understand situations. Using a new tool, the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ), the International Situations Project examines how people around the world describe situations and how situations influence their self-reported behavior. It is an important first step to better understand the situational challenge to behavior.

The project is led by Dr David Funder, additional information on the project, the instrument and the team can be found here.