678 vI. SELF‑ AND S OCIAL P ROCESSES
(1974, p. 518) wrote that “the classification 
of situations . . . will have to be in terms 
of the individual’s phenomenology, not the 
investigator’s”; and Allport (1937, p. 283) 
noted that “similarity is personal ” (empha -
sis added). In shaping a particular person’s 
behavior in a particular situation, the per -
son’s perception of the situation has a more 
direct effect on his or her behavior than does 
the “objective” situation itself.
Indeed, different people might perceive 
the same objective situation in dramatically 
different ways. For example, an extravert 
might perceive the presence of other people 
at a party as exciting, whereas a shy per -
son might perceive the presence of the very 
same people, doing the very same things, as 
threatening.
Although we can view such effects through 
the contemporary lens of person–  situation 
interactions (e.g., Atherton, Schofield, Sitka, 
Conger, & Robins, 2016), this is exactly the 
kind of mechanism that is the long-  standing 
province of personality research, as shown, 
for example, in Gordon Allport’s famous ob -
servation that “for some the world is a hos -
tile place where men are evil and dangerous; 
for others it is a stage for fun and frolic. It 
may appear as a place to do one’s duty grim -
ly; or a pasture for cultivating friendship and 
love” (1961, p. 266). Allport was clear that 
the basis of these differences in perception 
was personality traits, which have “the ca -
pacity to render many stimuli functionally 
equivalent” (1961, p. 347). Thus, an analy -
sis of how people perceive situations differ -
ently leads us right back to the traits that are 
the origins of these differences in perception 
and blends the analysis of situations with 
the analysis of dispositions. To fully under -
stand the effects of a situation on a person’s 
behavior, we must understand that person’s 
perceptions and, more fundamentally, his or 
her personality.
One general cautionary point regarding 
the analysis of situational effects is that it 
often leaves researchers unable to differen -
tiate what the situation “actually is” from 
what individuals perceive it to be (Rauth -
mann, Sherman, & Funder, 2015; Rauth -
mann & Sherman, 2019). The difference is 
between what the classic personality psy -
chologist Henry Murray (1938) called alpha press,  the objective situation, and beta press,  
the subjective one. The difference is impor -
tant. Indeed, an individual who manifests 
too large of a discrepancy may be fairly said 
to suffer from a delusion.
Fortunately, subjective and objective con -
ceptualizations of situational effects may 
not be as much at odds as is sometimes pre -
sumed. In a pair of studies, we examined the 
similarity between pairs of situations using 
both subjective and objective methods (Furr 
& Funder, 2004). In the first study, partici -
pants rated the degree to which two experi -
mental situations they had actually experi -
enced seemed (subjectively) similar, tapping 
what Murray might have called beta press . 
In the second study, we assessed the relative 
pairwise similarity of six experimental situ -
ations in terms of two aspects of objective 
similarity (task and participants), tapping 
alpha press . Behavior, using the Riverside 
Behavioral Q-Sort (RBQ; Funder, Furr, & 
Colvin, 2000), was coded from videotapes 
in both studies. The first study revealed that 
participants who saw the two experimental 
situations as similar tended to be consistent 
in their behavior across them. The second 
study revealed that participants were more 
consistent in their behavior across situations 
that were more objectively similar. These 
results demonstrate the importance of both 
alpha and beta press—the objective and 
subjective aspects of a situation—  by show -
ing that behavior is more consistent across 
situations to the degree that those situations 
are similar in either sense.
The relations between persons, situations, 
construal and behavior was recently sum -
marized in the Situation Construal Model 
(Funder, 2016; see Figure 31.1). The model is 
interactionist, in the terms used in the pres -
ent chapter, by illustrating how situations 
and personality affect each other in an on -
going process. It also portrays how both in -
dividual personality and objective aspects of 
the situation combine to produce each indi -
vidual’s construal of the situation, which in 
turn influences what he or she does. (Other 
pathways in the model show that some as -
pects of personality, such as temperament, 
and certain objective aspects of situations, 
such as rules, might affect behavior indepen -
dently of individual construals.)