A taxonomy of situations from Chinese idioms

Although considerable work has been done on personality structure, little attention has been paid to the structure of situations. A lexical approach to situational taxonomies is presented, based on abstract psychological descriptions of situations in Chinese idioms. Chinese idioms were chosen because they offer a rich set of single terms for labeling situations. Native speakers of Chinese and English each sorted one of two lists of situations in their native language. The resulting sorting data was cluster analyzed. There was good agreement between the Chinese and American participants in the major distinctions, particularly within the same list. Across the different samples of participants, goal processes, or what happened to people’s goals, best described the distinctions that people made across different situations. Implications of this taxonomy for conceptualizing situations and for thinking about the relationships between personality and situations are discussed.