ABSTRACT
Social psychologists are supposedly wedded to the Lewinian notion that understanding and predicting behavior depends on our ability to specify the “mands” of a situation, the psychological pushes and pulls reflective of the environment. But our conduct as scientists seems to belie this maxim. Social psychologists have seldom devoted much effort to descriptive research portraying the variety of different types of situations with which people must cope, the social “tasks” or problems they face in their everyday activities. Further, there have been even fewer attempts to develop a theoretical system for categorizing the features of such concrete situations in an abstract fashion. Sometimes it seems as if it is not even obvious what the term situation actually means to social psychologists (Holmes, 2000, 2002).
