ABSTRACT
Attention to the role of situations in influencing behavior has varied throughout the history of psychology, both in terms of views concerning its importance relative to person influences and in terms of views concerning the nature of situational influences. Independent of such theoretical differences, situations have been viewed as arousing organisms, eliciting specific behaviors, constraining or precluding specific behaviors, and altering the probabilities of present and future behaviors. Although just about every theoretical position would recognize that each of these situational influences plays a role in most human behavior, we are still without an adequate definition of the situation or an adequate conceptualization of its relationship to behavior (Pervin, 1978b).
