situation
n. one or more circumstances, conditions, states, or entities in the environment that have the potential to exert causal influences on an individual’s behavior. To social psychologists, the term commonly refers to the real or imagined presence of other persons, but it can also refer to the physical environment or to more abstract qualities (e.g., deadlines imposed by a supervisor or different motivational orientations). A central belief among social psychologists is that situations affect behavior, often powerfully so and often without the person’s awareness of such influence. Attention to the situation as a cause of behavior is commonly linked to Kurt Lewin’s famous dictum B = f(P, E), postulating that all behavior is a function of the person and the environment, although the strict separability of these two factors into independent causal forces is questionable.