Daily life unfolds in a sequence of situational contexts, which are pivotal for explaining people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. While situational data were previously difficult to collect, the ubiquity of smartphones now opens up new opportunities for assessing situations in situ, that is, while they occur. Seizing this development, the present study demonstrates how smartphones can help establish associations between the psychological perception and the physical reality of situations. We employed an intensive longitudinal sampling design and investigated 9,790 situational snapshots experienced by 455 participants for 14 consecutive days. These snapshots combined self-reported situation characteristics from experience samplings with their corresponding objective situation cues obtained via smartphone sensing. To account for the complexity of real-world situations, we extracted a total of 1,356 granular situation cues from different sensing modalities. We applied linear and nonlinear machine learning algorithms to examine how well these cues predicted the perceived characteristics in terms of the Situational Eight DIAMONDS, finding significant out-of-sample predictions for the five dimensions capturing the situations’ Duty, Intellect, Mating, pOsitivity, and Sociality. Analyses of (grouped) feature importance revealed that these predictions relied on complex constellations of cues representing various situational information about the Persons/Interactions and Objects present, the Events/Activities happening, and the current Location and Time. Furthermore, a nomological network analysis provided evidence for the construct validity of our cue-based DIAMONDS predictions. We conclude by discussing how smartphone-based situational snapshots, in general, and our prediction models, in particular, advance psychological research on situations.

Daily life unfolds in a sequence of situational contexts, which are pivotal for explaining people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. While situational data were previously difficult to collect, the ubiquity of smartphones now opens up new opportunities for assessing situations in situ, that is, while they occur. Seizing this opportunity, the present study demonstrates how smartphones can help establish associations between the psychological perception and physical reality of situations. We employed an intensive longitudinal sampling design and investigated 9,790 situational snapshots experienced by 455 participants for 14 consecutive days. These snapshots combined self-reported situation characteristics from experience samplings with their corresponding objective cues obtained via smartphone sensing. More precisely, we extracted a total of 1,356 granular cues from different sensing modalities to account for the complexity of real-world situations. We applied linear and nonlinear machine learning algorithms to examine how well these cues predicted the perceived characteristics in terms of the Situational Eight Duty, Intellect, Adversity, Mating, pOsitivity, Negativity, Deception, Sociality (DIAMONDS), finding significant out-of-sample predictions for the five dimensions reflecting the situations’ Duty, Intellect, Mating, pOsitivity, and Sociality. In a series of follow-up analyses, we further explored the data patterns captured by our models, revealing, for example, that those cues related to time and location were particularly informative of the respective situation characteristics. We conclude by interpreting the mapping between cues and characteristics in real-world situations and discussing how smartphone-based situational snapshots may push the boundaries of psychological research on situations.

No abstract

No abstract