The International Situations Project

University Of California-Riverside, Riverside CA

Investigators

Abstract

As the world is becoming increasingly interconnected through economic ties, political ties, and the internet, cross-cultural understanding is ever more important, and the consequences of cross-cultural misunderstanding are ever more dangerous. On a day-to-day basis, culture is reflected and transmitted through the experience of ordinary situations; the analysis of such daily experience provides an important and heretofore underutilized potential route towards better understanding of the ways in which cultures are similar or different. The present project seeks to assess the daily experience of people in 40 countries around the world, associating such experiences with cross-cultural differences in personality, economics, populations, and values. The findings of this research will shed new light on an under-researched, but fundamental issue for cross-cultural psychology and, even more broadly, psychology as a whole: how situations are related to personality and behavior. In previous research, the investigator, David Funder (University of California, Riverside) developed an international, multiple language version of the Riverside Situational Q-sort (RSQ) in which individuals assess real-world situations that they encounter by sorting 89 descriptive features along the degree to which each is characteristic or uncharacteristic. The proposed research adapts this Q-sort methodology for wide-spread international collaboration, by creating a freely available, flexible, and multilingual open-source website for collecting data about situations. Via international collaborators, participants in 40 countries will be recruited to complete the RSQ in their own language; they will also describe their behavior in the situation, and, separately, complete personality assessments. Using this novel and unique method for the comprehensive cross-cultural comparison of situational experience, the project will examine whether situations are an important active ingredient of culture and will test a variety of research questions regarding cross-cultural similarities and differences in ordinary situations. This project will have important implications for understanding intercultural relations and managing cultural diversity in a world where increasing numbers of individuals with different cultural backgrounds share situations with each other. Co-funding from the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE) provided support for this award.