An evolutionary formulation of person-situation interactions

This article proposes a novel evolutionary psychological formulation of person-situation interactions. Situations are defined by adaptive problems encountered and the corresponding evolved psychological mechanisms that render some clusters of cues psychologically salient and other information invisible. Developmental environments are defined by the distribution, salience, and sequencing of adaptive problems encountered over time. Person-situation interactions come in two main forms: (1) the ways in which person variables, through the processes of selection, evocation, and manipulation, lead to non-random exposure to different suites of adaptive problems, and (2) individual differences in the strategies deployed toward solving the adaptive problems that people non-randomly encounter. (c) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.