The theory of social situations has two main ingredients. First, it offers a unified way to represent social environments, namely, by means of “situations.” Second, it offers a unified criterion for the recommendations, namely, that the “standard of behavior” (for the given situation) be “stable.”

Situations

The notion of a “situation” defined below provides a complete description of the social environment. It specifies in an explicit and detailed manner the opportunities that are available to the agents.

To motivate and facilitate the definition of a situation, consider the game of chess. The set of players consists of two individuals: Black and White. There is a collection, say, C, of “admissible” configurations of the pieces on the board. For example, every configuration in C must be such that both kings are present on the board and occupy nonadjacent squares. For each pair (c,i), where c is a particular configuration in C and i is one of the two players, there is a set of configurations in C that player i can “induce” from c, if it is i's turn to make a move once c was reached. When this set is empty player i is checkmated. Clearly, all induced configurations must themselves be admissible, that is, belong to C, since the rules of the game apply to such and only such configurations.