Towards a comprehensive science of situations: On the importance of typicality and the lexical approach.

The two commentaries to the CAPTION derivation paper (Parrigon, Woo, Tay, & Wang, 2017) provided insightful points regarding the consistency of emergent dimensional structures in the extant literature (Rauthmann & Sherman, 2018, p. 482) and potential concerns regarding the use of the lexical approach to identify psychologically important situation dimensions (Reis, 2018, p. 489). In this rejoinder, we seek to further these important discussions by (a) emphasizing the importance of Typicality in understanding a broad range of psychological processes, (b) clarifying the utility of broad, dimensional-based situation taxonomies such as the CAPTION model for providing key theoretical and empirical linkages across discrete situations, as well as for capturing a broad range of psychologically meaningful dimensions of situations, and (c) reaffirming the need for cross-cultural/language and facet-level investigations of the CAPTION dimensions in future research. We hope that these discussions continue to advance the field toward a more comprehensive science of situations. (PsycINFO Database Record