Taxonomies of person characteristics are well developed, whereas taxonomies of psychologically important situation characteristics are underdeveloped. A working model of situation perception implies the existence of taxonomizable dimensions of psychologically meaningful, important, and consequential situation characteristics tied to situation cues, goal affordances, and behavior. Such dimensions are developed and demonstrated in a multi-method set of 6 studies. First, the "Situational Eight DIAMONDS" dimensions Duty, Intellect, Adversity, Mating, pOsitivity, Negativity, Deception, and Sociality (Study 1) are established from the Riverside Situational Q-Sort (Sherman, Nave, & Funder, 2010, 2012, 2013; Wagerman & Funder, 2009). Second, their rater agreement (Study 2) and associations with situation cues and goal/trait affordances (Studies 3 and 4) are examined. Finally, the usefulness of these dimensions is demonstrated by examining their predictive power of behavior (Study 5), particularly vis-à-vis measures of personality and situations (Study 6). Together, we provide extensive and compelling evidence that the DIAMONDS taxonomy is useful for organizing major dimensions of situation characteristics. We discuss the DIAMONDS taxonomy in the context of previous taxonomic approaches and sketch future research directions.

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.

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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 ...

Asian American parents espouse higher academic expectations relative to parents from other ethnic groups, yet these high expectations predict greater self-doubt in children who fall short of expectations. In the present study, 69 Asian American and 33 Latino undergraduate students discussed their parents’ expectations, how supportive they felt their parents were with their choice of major and school performance, and their feelings about their own academic performance. Differences between both groups emerged: Asian students perceived more pressure to do well academically than Latino students did. Asian students with more pressuring parents also expected them to be the most upset if they were to earn a C, saw them as less supportive, and ultimately felt less satisfied with their academic performance. In contrast, Latino students with more pressuring parents expected them to be upset (but not to the same degree as Asian parents), yet still felt more supported and satisfied with their academic performance. High parental expectations may impose self-critical evaluation of performance among Asians, while they foster more parental support among Latinos.