 31. Persons, Situations, and Person–Situation Interactions  677
action is to seek to understand how people 
shape situations. Personality dispositions 
can indirectly affect behavior by shaping the 
situations in which people find themselves. 
Years ago, Buss (1979; see also Scarr & Mc -
Cartney, 1983; Snyder & Ickes, 1985) noted 
two ways in which this occurs: situational 
selection  and situational evocation . To this, 
we can add situation perception  as a third 
mechanism by which different people expe -
rience different situations, or experience the 
same situation differently.
Situational selection  is important, because 
it addresses the fact that individuals do not 
just passively find themselves in the situa -
tions of their lives; they often actively seek 
and choose them (Ickes, Snyder, & Garcia, 
1997). In particular, individuals may seek 
situations that “fit” their personalities— 
situations that allow them to engage in the 
types of activities they enjoy, to have the 
types of experiences they value, to be in en -
vironments that they find comfortable, or to 
express themselves in ways that they value. 
Thus, while a certain kind of bar may tend 
to generate a situation that creates fights at 
closing time, only a certain kind of person 
chooses to go to that kind of bar in the first 
place. Even if everybody at the bar ends up 
in the fight, therefore, the psychological ex -
cuse that “the situation made me do it” is 
less than completely persuasive. Instead, at -
tributes of the person and the situation he or 
she chose have worked in tandem.
Situational evocation  refers to the ways in 
which an individual’s actions or even mere 
presence in a situation can change the situa -
tion’s dynamics. An aggressive person walk -
ing into a quiet discussion may change the 
situation dramatically for everyone there. 
What was originally a cordial conversation 
might become a hostile argument, with the 
aggressive person him- or herself being at -
tacked and, in turn, attacking others. Re -
flecting on the situation, the aggressive 
person might suggest that his or her attacks 
was simply a reasonable response to being 
attacked—  again, a version of “the situation 
made me do it.” However, the person created 
the conditions that ostensibly led to those at -
tacks. Again, notice how the attributes of a 
person are not competing  with the attributes 
of the situation for control of behavior; they 
work together to produce the final result.Despite the importance of this conceptu -
alization of person–  situation interaction, 
both situational selection and evocation are 
understudied. In part this is because of the 
difficulty in empirically capturing dynamic 
processes, such as the ways in which situa -
tions change during interactions as a func -
tion of what people do during them (see, e.g., 
Gottman & Bakeman, 1986). An even more 
important consideration is the lack of gen -
eral variables for describing the psychologi -
cally important elements of situations. Al -
though the literature of experimental social 
psychology contains, latently, an enormous 
range of information about how situations 
affect behavior, it is not organized in such a 
way as to yield insights about which aspects 
of situations are important for determining 
which behaviors, or how they do it; that is, 
there is no clear agreed-  upon categoriza -
tion of “situational variables” that represent 
the most fundamental ways that situations 
differ from each other. Such variables are 
necessary before researchers can study how 
situations are chosen and the ways in which 
they may change over time (see the later sec -
tion on situational assessment).
Nevertheless, important work in this area 
is evolving (e.g., Rauthmann, Sherman, 
Nave, & Funder, 2015; Sherman, Rauth -
mann, Brown, Serfass, & Jones, 2015). 
For example, Wrzus, Wagner, and Riediger 
(2016) discovered links between the Big Five 
personality traits and certain types of situa -
tions. Perhaps not surprisingly, extraverted 
participants reported being with friends, col -
leagues, and strangers more than did intro -
verted participants. Similarly, neurotic par -
ticipants reported being alone more than did 
emotionally stable participants. Although 
this work does not reveal intentional selec -
tion or evocation of situations, it certainly 
suggests that such processes might be occur -
ring, and it points future researchers in the 
direction of specific person–  situation links.
Going beyond the relatively concrete ef -
fects of selection and evocation, many psy -
chologists have observed that the effect of 
a situation depends on the person who ap -
prehends it. For example, Mischel (1977, 
p. 253) commented that “any given, objec -
tive stimulus condition may have a variety 
of effects, depending on how the individual 
construes and transforms it”; Bem and Allen 