A situation is a state of affairs or combination of circumstances. For our purposes, it’s our unit of analysis. It’s where collaboration and conflict happen, and where you do something different to see if you can get a better result.
In social psychology, a situation is the entire network of external social forces, immediate physical environment, and subjective psychological influences on a person at any given moment. Social psychology separates a situation into objective and subjective layers. The objective situation includes the physical and structural environment such as an event, team members, rules of engagement, stated goals and objectives. The subjective situation is the psychological environment created inside the mind – how we perceive, interpret, and assign meaning to the objective situation. Social psychologists refer to this as construal.
Ross and Ward – and many researchers since – argue we act in a construed situation which we belive is objective. See Naive Realism for more information.
« Back to Glossary Index