Personality orientation is a topic that interests many people. Characteristics of personality orientation include many aspects of the formation of individual needs. An integral person never denies any significant manifestations of his life, even if at some point they seem meaningless or wrong to him. The concept of personality orientation and motivation for activity is being studied by modern scientists and coming to interesting conclusions. Determining the orientation of a person allows us to identify the essence of this concept. Personality orientation represents certain areas of a person’s life that have undeniable significance for him. Let us consider in more detail the types of personality orientation.
Individual focus
The basis of a personality’s orientation is, of course, its inner world. Everyone has their own individual preferences, which distinguish one person from another. Individual aspirations, desires, dreams make up a picture of a holistic personality that strives for new horizons and wants to achieve a specific goal. A person's level of awareness depends on how well he understands his deepest needs.
Awareness of personal motives leads to the discovery of true joy. Such a person lives life to the fullest, paying attention to his true aspirations and motives. By developing his natural gifts and talents, a person can come closer to understanding the essence of his destiny. By performing this or that action, he makes a choice that leads him to something specific.
Social orientation
Every person needs friendly participation, to be understood. To achieve such a goal, you need to really effectively interact with people. Social orientation is a personality orientation in which a person is guided by the opinions of others and wants to make a favorable impression in society. In personality psychology there is a concept of needs, which determines the main forms of personal development.
Individual growth is often driven by social interaction. Outside the team and immediate environment, a person will not be able to develop fully, will not be able to understand what he really needs. Its psychological manifestations indicate the expression of personal maturity. The method of determining the social orientation of an individual allows you to recognize your deepest needs in time and do everything to achieve effective self-realization.
Business orientation
It is a type of orientation in which a person experiences a high need for business contacts. If a person feels characteristic prospects in himself, then he certainly wants to express himself as best as possible. Activities provide such an opportunity and help expand the boundaries of existing prospects. Personal business helps strengthen character and build self-confidence.
Many researchers consider the business orientation of an individual to be the highest form of orientation, since it helps to develop, set real achievable goals and strive to achieve them. Every person, regardless of age, has the opportunity to increase their level of achievement. An indicator of personal growth is the ability to be satisfied with one’s personality, and there are many such examples.
Emotional focus
Personality orientation is a fairly deep and multifaceted topic. It should be studied using special schemes and methods of personality orientation. The direction of personality is not limited to social interaction and individual aspirations. Every person has the ability, one way or another, to react to the manifestations of their own feelings. The emotions of the people around us also have a certain influence on this area.
The emotional direction is a person’s special world, where he does not allow outsiders. Sometimes it is impossible to even briefly imagine what a person experiences when he finds himself in a particular situation. Each condition nurtures and shapes something in a person. Emotions play a primary role here. They allow you to understand others and form your own attitude to what is happening.
Peculiarities
The forms of personality orientation are of great interest. They reflect the degree of a person’s satisfaction with himself and his attitude towards others. If one area develops less than others, then the individual inevitably begins to suffer. This is why every need must be satisfied. Let us consider in more detail the features of personality orientation.
Value level
The level of values determines the orientation of the individual, his needs and motives. What a person focuses on first of all is of primary importance to him. Everyone has their own values. You cannot compare one person to another and try to draw any parallels between them. Spiritual and moral values show how much a person develops and pays attention to his inner world. The psychology of personality orientation studies the motives of a person’s actions, his life guidelines. A person’s values become his main guideline in life and encourage him to search for new opportunities.
Determination
Without this component it is impossible to achieve any success. The more a person imagines what she really needs, the sooner she can achieve a satisfactory result. Determination helps you overcome obstacles and significant obstacles. If a person does not understand why he needs to take certain actions, then the necessary steps will never be taken. Only those who truly understand the need for further action will begin to make efforts for self-realization, in order to feel visible changes in themselves.
Having a clear goal makes it much easier to achieve your dreams. A person begins to imagine what he really needs. Determination helps you stay true to yourself even when the obstacles are too many to try to avoid.
Harmony with yourself
Being in unity with your inner essence is as important as being able to achieve your goal. The more satisfied a person is with his own life, the more potential he can unlock to feel truly happy. Harmony with oneself is an important aspect of personality orientation, contributing to a better understanding of the essence of things. A sense of inner worth often leads to better self-expression. A person who truly loves himself will not allow others to hurt him.
Ability to finish what you start
An important skill that not everyone has. The fact is that many people begin some action, succumbing to the first impulse. But they often lack the inner strength to really actively make decisions, be responsible and reasonable. The ability to bring what you start to its logical conclusion is an important skill that you should try to cultivate in yourself. Otherwise, good undertakings will not end in any satisfactory result.
You should go towards the desired goal step by step, based on the efforts made. The more a person realizes the need to accept changes in his life, the easier it will be for him to act in the future. The ability to finish what you start is, of course, an important skill that cannot be avoided if you are planning any significant achievement. People are sometimes too afraid of failure. For this reason, they avoid trying something again. By making new attempts, you can increase your chances of achieving the desired result. You should not give up on your goals just because for some reason they cannot be realized immediately.
Thus, the orientation of a personality represents its focus on certain aspects of life and activity. A person is a versatile creature; he needs to switch between many spheres in order to feel happy. Self-realization plays a big role here.
Characteristics of personality orientation
Personal orientation is a set of stable motives, views, beliefs, needs and aspirations that orient a person towards certain behavior and activities, and the achievement of relatively complex life goals. Orientation is always socially conditioned and formed in ontogenesis in the process of training and education, acts as a personality trait, manifested in ideological, professional orientation, in activities related to personal hobbies, doing something in free time from the main activity. In all these types of human activity, direction is manifested in the characteristics of the individual’s interests: the goals that a person sets for himself, the needs, preferences and attitudes carried out in drives, desires, inclinations, ideals, etc.
Directional forms:
Needs, motives
goal - the desired and imagined result of a specific activity of a person or group of people
ideal - an image that is the embodiment of perfection and an example of the highest goal in the aspirations of the individual
conviction is the highest form of personality orientation, manifested in the conscious need to act in accordance with one’s value orientations against the background of emotional experiences and volitional aspirations
attitude - an individual’s readiness for a certain activity, which is actualized in the current situation. It manifests itself in a stable predisposition to a certain perception, comprehension and behavior of an individual. An attitude expresses a person’s position, his views, value orientations in relation to various facts of everyday life, social life and professional activity. It can be positive, negative or neutral.
Interest is a mental state that provides direction to the Personality. Interest, like motive, arises in conditions of information deficiency, when a person does not receive enough knowledge that he would like to have.
worldview - a system of views and ideas about the world, a person’s relationship to society, nature, and himself
Characteristics of personality orientation
- Directional level– this is the ratio of higher and lower needs; the higher the level of focus, the more mature and spiritually rich the personality.
- Breadth of focus characterized by the diversity of its main components and has a decisive influence on the richness of the inner world and the versatility of the individual.
- Directional intensity– this is the degree of awareness of needs and motives: low intensity of orientation characterizes orientation as a system of unconscious drives, high intensity - as a system of fundamental beliefs.
- Directional stability is determined by the constancy and consistency of its individual components; the integrity of the individual depends on the stability of the orientation.
- Directional Effectiveness- this is the degree of perseverance of the individual in realizing goals, motives, etc., which determines the activity of the individual’s life position.
There are three main types of personality orientation: personal, collectivistic and business.
Personal orientation is created by the predominance of motives for one’s own well-being, the desire for personal primacy and prestige. Such a person is most often busy with himself, with his feelings and experiences, and reacts little to the needs of the people around him. He sees work, first of all, as an opportunity to satisfy his own aspirations, regardless of the interests of other employees. It has been established that individuals with a self-directed personality have the following character traits:
– more preoccupied with themselves and their feelings and problems
– make unfounded and hasty conclusions about other people, also behave in discussions
– trying to impose their will on the group
– those around them do not feel free in their presence
Orientation towards mutual actions - occurs when a person’s actions are determined by the need for communication, the desire to maintain good relationships with fellow workers and students. Such a person shows interest in joint activities, although he may not contribute to the successful completion of the task; often his actions even make it difficult to complete the group task and his actual assistance may be minimal. People with a focus on mutual action:
- avoid direct solution to the problem
– yield to group pressure
– do not express original ideas and it is not easy to understand what such a person wants to express
– do not take leadership when it comes to choosing tasks
Business orientation - reflects the predominance of motives generated by the activity itself, passion for the process of activity, a selfless desire for knowledge, mastering new skills and abilities. Typically, such a person seeks cooperation and achieves the greatest productivity of the group, and therefore tries to prove a point of view that he considers useful for completing the task. Business-oriented people:
– help individual group members express their thoughts
– support the group to achieve its goal
– express their thoughts and considerations easily and clearly
– take the lead when it comes to choosing a task
– do not shy away from directly solving the problem
There are many scientific definitions of the concept of “personal orientation”; psychologists understand it differently. But what is certain is that focus– one of the leading characteristics and the most important personality trait, which expresses the dynamics of the development of the individual as a social being.
Many Soviet psychologists made a significant contribution to the study of the phenomenon of personality orientation. The concepts of S.L. are world famous. Rubinstein (about the dynamic tendency), A. N. Leontyev (about the meaning-forming motive), B.G. Ananyev (about the main direction of life).
In fact, personality orientation is the totality of a person’s motives or motives. Simply put, focus – this is what a person wants and what he is so accustomed to striving for that these aspirations have become the “support”, the “core” of his personality. The orientation of a person, like a trend in fashion, determines the style in which a person will live.
Focus– this is a complex personality property that allows you to understand the goals and motives of a person’s behavior, as well as predict them. After all, knowing what the subject is oriented towards in life, what his attitudes and orientation are, one can guess how he will act in a given situation. Conversely, by observing a person in any significant situation, you can understand his personal orientation.
Focus is being formed in the process of education and self-education and is always socially conditioned, that is, it depends on the foundations of society and is assessed from the point of view of morality, ethics, and traditions.
Forms personality orientation:
- goals,
- motives,
- needs,
- constant subjective attitude,
- value guidelines,
- ideals,
- interests,
- principles,
- likes and dislikes,
- tastes,
- inclinations,
- attachments and so on.
Focus influences on character, abilities, temporary mental states, and even on temperament, which is practically incapable of changing throughout life.
The most important function of personality orientation is meaning-forming. Man is a creature in need of meaning. If there is no meaning, there is no motive, and without motive there is no activity. Direction organizes human activity and makes it meaningful in all areas, be it personal life or work.
The direction of a person, as well as a person’s desire for a specific goal, does not appear out of nowhere and is not something stable.
The direction is formed step by step. Step by step, step by step appear structural components personality orientation:
Interests as structural components of personality orientation can say much more about a person than his drives, desires and aspirations. Knowing what a person is interested in, you can already get a rough idea about him.
- Addiction. Inclinations determine not a contemplative, but an active orientation. The tendency encourages you to act in one direction not just once, but by returning to a certain activity again and again. An inclination arises when interest is supported by will; it can be called interest in a specific type of activity.
- Ideal. This is a concrete image of the ultimate goal of inclination, a personal guideline, support in making important decisions and the basis of a worldview.
- Worldview. This is a set of views on the world, society and oneself, combined into a single, holistic model. Worldview is a set of personal laws of life that help you adapt in the present and plan for the future.
- Belief. The highest form of orientation, which is a system of conscious life motives that encourage one to act in accordance with the principles and worldview. Without beliefs, a person would have to learn and understand from his own experience how to act over and over again. Beliefs help you quickly determine the correct model of behavior in a given situation. A set of beliefs is a set of groups of stable motives, which form the “core” of a person’s orientation.
This sequence - from attraction to belief - is similar matryoshka: each subsequent structural component contains the previous ones.
The orientation of a personality, depending on the main object of aspiration, can be several species:
- Personal or direction to myself. With this orientation, a person strives for self-realization, satisfaction of personal needs and achievement of his own goals.
These are purposeful, responsible, organized, self-reliant, thinking and planning, and at the same time active individuals.
Such people are strong and self-confident, but from the outside it may seem that they are self-confident and selfish. Their problem is often the inability to delegate authority, ask for help, and the desire for loneliness. 
- Collectivist or direction on others. The main need of people with this type of orientation is communication and contact with other individuals.
Such individuals are non-conflict, courteous, respectable, ready to help, empathize and participate, focus on others, listen to other people’s opinions, and wait for approval. A collectivist orientation makes a person an excellent partner, reliable and easy to get along with people both in a team and in a family.
The problems of those directed at other individuals lie in their inability to express their own opinions, resist manipulation, and fight for personal happiness. Unfortunately, such people do not know how to plan, are afraid of serious responsibility, and are not able to determine personal goals.
- Business, direction to the point. Activity-oriented people combine personal gain with the benefit of society.
They are self-demanding, serious, reliable, sociable, friendly, but at the same time independent and very freedom-loving individuals. They love to study and learn something new.
To determine the type of personal orientation, it was developed (by the author of the technique B. Bass), since accurately determining it on your own is quite problematic.
There are other classifications of personality orientation types. For example, suicidal and depressive tendencies are distinguished separately. This type of orientation has a pronounced negative connotation and undoubtedly requires psychological correction.
As for the three main orientations (toward oneself, to others, and to the cause), they cannot be assessed as clearly positive or negative. All we can say for sure is that the orientation of a person directly affects the success of any human activity and his life in general.
We recommend reading the classic work by B.G. Ananyeva “Man as an object of knowledge”; for parents who want to successfully raise their child - the book by A. Moiseeva “Altruistic orientation of the individual and its formation in the family”; We recommend to teachers – A.V. Zosimovsky
Ministry of Education of the Republic of Belarus
Educational institution
"Vitebsk State Technological University"
Department of History and Law
Test
in the discipline "Fundamentals of Psychology"
Performed:
Student, group Zkd-25
Shidlovskaya K.P.
address: 210000, Vitebsk,
General Ivanovsky St., 16, apt. 3
1. The concept of personality orientation in modern psychology
2.Needs and motives of the individual
Human interests
Value orientations of the individual
Practical tasks
Conclusion
List of used literature
1. The concept of personality orientation in modern psychology
In modern psychology there are various approaches to the study of personality. However, despite the differences in interpretations of personality, all approaches highlight orientation as its leading characteristic. There are different definitions of this concept, for example, “dynamic tendency” (S. L. Rubinstein), “meaning-forming motive” (A. N. Leontiev), “dominant attitude” (V. N. Myasishchev), “main life orientation” (B . G. Ananyev), “dynamic organization of the essential forces of man” (A. S. Prangishvili). Most often in the scientific literature, orientation is understood as a set of stable motives that orient the activity of an individual and are relatively independent of the current situation. It should be noted that the orientation of the individual is always socially conditioned and formed in the process of education. Orientation is attitudes that have become personality traits and are manifested in such forms as attraction, desire, aspiration, interest, inclination, ideal, worldview, belief. Moreover, the basis of all forms of personality orientation are the motives of activity. Let us briefly characterize each of the identified forms of orientation in the order of their hierarchy. First of all, you should focus on attraction. It is generally accepted that attraction is the most primitive, inherently biological form of orientation. From a psychological point of view, it is a mental state that expresses an undifferentiated, unconscious or insufficiently conscious need. As a rule, attraction is a transitory phenomenon, since the need represented in it either fades away or is realized, turning into desire. Desire is a conscious need and attraction to something very specific. It should be noted that desire, being sufficiently conscious, has a motivating force. It sharpens awareness of the purpose of future action and the construction of its plan. This form of focus is characterized by awareness not only of one’s need, but also of possible ways to satisfy it. The next form of focus is aspiration. Aspiration arises when a volitional component is included in the structure of desire. Therefore, desire is often considered as a very specific motivation for activity. The orientation of a person is most clearly characterized by her interests. Interest is a specific form of manifestation of a cognitive need that ensures that the individual is focused on understanding the goals of the activity and thereby contributes to the individual’s orientation in the surrounding reality. Subjectively, interest is revealed in the emotional tone that accompanies the process of cognition or attention to a certain object. One of the most significant characteristics of interest is that when it is satisfied, it does not fade away, but, on the contrary, evokes new interests that correspond to a higher level of cognitive activity. Interests are the most important motivating force for understanding the surrounding reality. A distinction is made between direct interest caused by the attractiveness of the object and indirect interest in the object as a means of achieving the goals of the activity. An indirect characteristic of the awareness of needs reflected in interests is the stability of interests, which is expressed in the duration of their preservation and in their intensity. It should also be emphasized that the breadth and content of interests can serve as one of the most striking characteristics of a person. Interest in the dynamics of its development can turn into an inclination. This happens when the volitional component is included in interest. Propensity characterizes an individual’s orientation towards a certain activity. The basis of the inclination is the deep, stable need of the individual for a particular activity, i.e. interest in a certain type of activity. The basis of the inclination can also be the desire to improve skills related to this need. It is generally accepted that the emerging inclination can be considered as a prerequisite for the development of certain abilities. The next form of manifestation of personality orientation is the ideal. An ideal is the objective goal of an individual’s inclination, concretized in an image or representation, i.e., what he strives for, what he is oriented toward. A person’s ideals can act as one of the most significant characteristics of a person’s worldview, that is, his system of views on the objective world, on the place of a person in it, on a person’s attitude to the reality around him and to himself. The worldview reflects not only ideals, but also the value orientations of people, their principles of cognition and activity, and their beliefs. Conviction is the highest form of orientation - it is a system of individual motives that encourages her to act in accordance with her views, principles, and worldview. Beliefs are based on conscious needs that encourage a person to act and form his motivation for activity. Since we have approached the problem of motivation, it should be noted that there are two functionally interconnected sides in human behavior: incentive and regulatory. The mental processes and states we discussed earlier provide mainly regulation of behavior. As for its stimulation, or motives that ensure the activation and direction of behavior, they are associated with motives and motivation. Motive is the motivation for activity related to satisfying the subject's needs. Motive is also often understood as the reason underlying the choice of actions and actions, the set of external and internal conditions that cause the activity of the subject. The term “motivation” is a broader concept than the term “motive”. The word “motivation” is used in modern psychology in a double sense: as denoting a system of factors that determine behavior (this includes, in particular, needs, motives, goals, intentions, aspirations and much more), and as a characteristic of the process that stimulates and supports behavioral activity at a certain level. Most often in the scientific literature, motivation is considered as a set of psychological reasons that explain human behavior, its beginning, direction and activity. The question of motivation for activity arises every time it is necessary to explain the reasons for a person’s actions. Moreover, any form of behavior can be explained by both internal and external reasons. In the first case, the starting and final points of explanation are the psychological properties of the subject of behavior, and in the second case, the external conditions and circumstances of his activity. In the first case, they talk about motives, needs, goals, intentions, desires, interests, etc., and in the second, they talk about incentives emanating from the current situation. Sometimes all the psychological factors that, as it were, from within a person determine his behavior, are called personal dispositions. Then, accordingly, they talk about dispositional and situational motivations as analogues of internal and external determination of behavior. Internal (dispositional) and external (situational) motivations are interconnected. Dispositions can be updated under the influence of a certain situation, and the activation of certain dispositions (motives, needs) leads to a change in the subject’s perception of the situation. In this case, his attention becomes selective, and the subject biasedly perceives and evaluates the situation based on current interests and needs. Therefore, any human action is considered as doubly determined: dispositionally and situationally. A person's momentary behavior should not be viewed as a reaction to certain internal or external stimuli, but as the result of a continuous interaction of his dispositions with the situation. Thus, human motivation can be represented as a cyclical process of continuous mutual influence and transformation, in which the subject of action and the situation mutually influence each other and the result of which is actually observed behavior. From this point of view, motivation is a process of continuous choice and decision-making based on weighing behavioral alternatives. In turn, a motive, in contrast to motivation, is something that belongs to the subject of behavior himself, is his stable personal property, which internally encourages him to perform certain actions. Motives can be conscious or unconscious. The main role in shaping a person’s orientation belongs to conscious motives. It should be noted that the motives themselves are formed from human needs. Need is the state of a person’s need for certain conditions of life and activity or material objects. A need, like any state of personality, is always associated with a person’s feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. All living beings have needs, and this is how living nature differs from inanimate nature. Another difference, also related to needs, is the selectivity of the living thing’s response to precisely what constitutes the subject of needs, i.e., to what the body lacks at a given moment in time. Need activates the body, stimulates its behavior aimed at finding what is required. The quantity and quality of needs that living beings have depends on the level of their organization, on the way and conditions of life, on the place occupied by the corresponding organism on the evolutionary ladder. Plants that need only certain biochemical and physical conditions of existence have the least needs. A person has the most diverse needs, who in addition to physical and organic needs also have spiritual and social ones. Social needs are expressed in a person’s desire to live in society and interact with other people. The main characteristics of human needs are strength, frequency of occurrence and method of satisfaction. An additional, but very significant characteristic, especially when it comes to the individual, is the substantive content of the need, i.e., the totality of those objects of material and spiritual culture with the help of which a given need can be satisfied. The motivating factor for activity is the goal. A goal is a conscious result towards which an action associated with an activity that satisfies an actualized need is currently aimed. If we imagine the entire sphere of conscious behavior as a kind of arena in which a colorful and multifaceted performance of human life unfolds, and we assume that the place that should attract the greatest attention of the viewer (the subject himself) is most brightly illuminated at the moment, then this will be the goal. Psychologically, a goal is that motivational content of consciousness that is perceived by a person as the immediate and immediate expected result of his activity. The goal is the main object of attention, which occupies a certain amount of short-term and working memory; the thought process unfolding at a given moment in time and most of all kinds of emotional experiences are associated with it. It is customary to distinguish between the purpose of activity and the purpose of life. This is due to the fact that a person has to perform many different activities throughout his life, each of which realizes a specific goal. But the goal of any individual activity reveals only one side of the personality’s orientation, manifested in this activity. The life goal acts as a generalizing factor of all private goals associated with individual activities. At the same time, the realization of each of the goals of the activity is a partial realization of the general life goal of the individual. The level of achievement of an individual is associated with life goals. In the life goals of the individual, the “concept of one’s own future”, which he recognizes, finds expression. A person’s awareness of not only the goal, but also the reality of its implementation is considered as a personal perspective. The state of frustration, depression, characteristic of a person who is aware of the impossibility of realizing a prospect, is called frustration. This condition occurs in cases where a person, on the way to achieving a goal, encounters really insurmountable obstacles, barriers, or when they are perceived as such. The motivational sphere of a person, from the point of view of its development, can be assessed according to the following parameters: breadth, flexibility and hierarchy. The breadth of the motivational sphere is understood as the qualitative diversity of motivational factors - dispositions (motives), needs and goals. The more diverse motives, needs and goals a person has, the more developed his motivational sphere is. The flexibility of the motivational sphere is expressed in the fact that in order to satisfy a motivational impulse of a more general nature (of a higher level), more diverse motivational incentives of a lower level can be used. For example, the motivational sphere of a person is more flexible; depending on the circumstances of satisfying the same motive, he can use more diverse means than another person. Let's say, for one individual the need for knowledge can be satisfied only with the help of television, radio and cinema, while for another the means of satisfying it are also a variety of books, periodicals, and communication with people. The latter's motivational sphere, by definition, will be more flexible. It should be noted that breadth and flexibility characterize a person’s motivational sphere in different ways. Breadth is the diversity of the potential range of objects that can serve for a given person as a means of satisfying an actual need, and flexibility is the mobility of connections that exist between different levels of the hierarchical organization of the motivational sphere: between motives and needs, motives and goals, needs and goals. The next characteristic of the motivational sphere is the hierarchization of motives. Some motives and goals are stronger than others and arise more often; others are weaker and are updated less frequently. The greater the differences in the strength and frequency of actualization of motivational formations of a certain level, the higher the hierarchization of the motivational sphere. It should be noted that the problem of studying motivation has always attracted the attention of researchers. Therefore, there are many different concepts and theories devoted to motives, motivation and personality orientation.
2. Needs and motives of the individual
The prerequisite for this or that action, the source of human activity, is need. People carry out various types of activities without inventing them, but in need of their results. In “Dialectics of Nature” F. Engels wrote:
“People are accustomed to explaining their actions from their thinking, instead of explaining them from their needs...”*.
The need determines the orientation of the organism, individual, personality, social community towards the creation and implementation of conditions of existence and development. The conditions necessary for human life and development are divided into three groups:
a) conditions for the life and development of man as a natural organism (hence natural or organic needs);
b) conditions for the life and development of a person as an individual, as a representative of the human race (conditions for communication, knowledge, work);
* Marx K., Engels F. Op. T. 20. P 493.
c) conditions for the life and development of a given person as an individual, to satisfy a broad system of his individualized needs. All these conditions form the optimal parameters of human life, his psychophysiological homeostasis.
Need is the need experienced by a person to eliminate deviations from the parameters of life that are optimal for him as a biological being, an individual and a personality.
The most significant, basic needs determine the direction of the entire human psyche - his feelings, thinking, will and sensory systems.
There are differences between potential (non-actualized) and actualized needs - the current mental state of tension, discomfort, caused by a mismatch between the internal and external living conditions of a given individual. This contradiction between internal and external, expressed in need, is the main factor in human activity.
Needs can be divided according to the main types of human activity:
) needs related to labor,- the needs of knowledge and creation;
) needs related to development,- the need for play, learning, self-realization;
) needs related to social communication,social identification, - moral and spiritual needs.
All these needs are socially conditioned, generated in a certain human society and are therefore called sociogenic.
In addition, a large range of human needs is determined by biological necessity. These needs are called biogenic(vital, from lat.vita - life). These include: 1) the need for security, self-preservation; 2) the need for energy restoration and physical activity; 3) the need to prepare to overcome obstacles (one of the areas of realization of this need is learning and physical play); 4) the need for procreation (Fig. 91).
Rice. 91. Hierarchy (pyramid) of human needs (according to A. X. Maslow).
Abraham Harold Maslow (1908-1970), an American psychologist, proposed the concept of a systematic study of personality psychology based on an analysis of the hierarchy of its value and semantic formations. Maslow created a hierarchical model of personal motivation ("Motivation and Personality", 1954) and believed that higher needs guide a person's behavior to the extent that his lower level needs are satisfied.
Natural, organic human needs arise without special formation, while all social needs arise only in the process of education. However, even organic human needs are subject to socialization. Depending on what social values the needs are associated with, their different levels differ - higher and lower.
Antisocial behavior is associated with going beyond the boundaries of so-called reasonable needs. Unreasonable needs are hypertrophied needs of lower levels that impede the development of needs of higher levels. Only the hard work of the individual and the entire society to elevate needs can limit unreasonable needs - the hypertrophy of materialism, businessmanship, and utilitarianism.
Material consumption for a socialized individual is primarily a condition for his creative activity. If animals act only in order to consume, then man consumes in order to act, create, and ensure the progress of social development.
Excessive material consumption, which has become an end in itself, is a sign of desocialization of the individual.
People's needs depend on the historical level of production and consumption, on human living conditions, traditions and prevailing tastes in a given social group.
Unlike animals, which have a stable range of needs, human needs are constantly expanding (as his productive capabilities expand).
The historical process of human development is characterized by the objective law of the rise of human needs. For an individual, a regression of needs is possible - a “spreading” of the needs of lower levels.
All needs have direction, intensity, and cyclicity.
From a neurophysiological point of view, a need represents the formation of a dominant - a stable excitation of certain brain mechanisms that organize and regulate the necessary behavioral acts.
Needs are consolidated in the process of satisfying them. The satisfied need first fades away, but then arises with greater intensity. Weak needs become more persistent in the process of their repeated satisfaction.
A need becomes the basis of a behavioral act only if means and conditions are available or can be created to satisfy it (subject of activity, instrument of activity, knowledge and methods of action). The more diverse the means of satisfying a given need, the more firmly they are fixed.
Need determines the entire adaptive mechanism of the psyche. Objects of reality are reflected as possible conditions (or obstacles) to satisfying the need. As P. Milner notes, the needs are equipped with its detectors and effectors*.
The emergence of certain urgent needs and their actualization organizes the psyche to set appropriate goals. In this case, external influences are selectively covered by the dominant motivational activity of the individual.
Motivation of personality behavior
Motivation is the excitation of certain nervous structures (functional systems) caused by an actualized need, causing directed activity of the body. (For example, food, sexual, cognitive, protective and other types of motivation may arise.)
The admission of certain sensory stimulations into the cerebral cortex, their strengthening or weakening, depends on the motivational state. The effectiveness of an external stimulus depends not only on its objective qualities, but also on the motivational state of the organism. (A well-fed body does not respond to the most attractive food.) External stimuli become stimuli, i.e., signals to action only if the body has an appropriate motivational state. At the same time, the brain models the parameters of objects that are necessary to satisfy the need, and patterns of activity to master the required object. These patterns - behavioral programs - can be either innate, instinctive, or based on individual experience.
Motivation for behavior is always emotionally charged. What we strive for excites us emotionally. At the same time, some emotions perform a strategic function - they are an indicator of needs, the significance of a certain class of objects, others are associated with determining the significance of individual conditions that ensure the achievement of the object of need. Being a direct “determiner” of the significance, usefulness or harmfulness of certain phenomena, emotions provide the appropriate energetic mobilization of the body for the appropriate interaction of the individual with these objects.
Human motivational states differ significantly from the motivational states of animals in that they are regulated by the second signal, a generalized system of value orientations of the individual. All motivational states are modifications of need states.
Motivational states of a person include interests, desires, aspirations, intentions, drives, passions, attitudes.
Interest - an emotionally intense focus on objects associated with stable human needs (from Latin interest - matters). Interest manifests itself in increased attention to an object of lasting significance.
“If the physical world is subject to the law of motion, then the spiritual world is no less subject to the law of interests. On earth, interest is an all-powerful magician, changing the appearance of every object in the eyes of all beings*.
Interest is a motivational and regulatory mechanism of human behavior, determined by the hierarchy of formed needs.
However, the connection between interests and needs is not straightforward, and sometimes it is not realized. Interests can be direct or indirect, arising in connection with the means of achieving goals.
Interest as a mental state significantly influences mental processes and activates them. According to needs, interests are divided into content(material and spiritual), latitude(limited and versatile) and sustainability(short-term and sustainable).
Satisfying an interest not only does not extinguish it, but forms an even more ramified system of interests.
Acting as the orientational basis of a person’s behavior, interests become the main psychological mechanism of behavior. Interests not only stimulate a person to activity, but are themselves formed in it.
The breadth and depth of a person’s interests determine the fullness of his life. The interests of an asocial personality are characterized, as a rule, by narrowness, selfish orientation, mercantilism, and utilitarianism. Personality characteristics include determining the range of interests of a given person. A person’s interests are closely related to his desires, passions and drives.
Desire is a motivational state in which needs are correlated with a specific object for their satisfaction. Desire represents a certain stage in the maturation of a need, correlating it with a goal and a plan of action. Epicurus also divided all human desires into three groups: 1) natural and necessary (the desire for food, drink, sleep, rest, etc.), 2) natural, but not necessary (for example, sexual desires), 3) desires that are not natural , nor necessary. The list of this third group of desires is endless: desires associated with ambition, thirst for fame, power, leadership, primacy, superiority over other people, etc.
* Helvetius K. A.About the mind. M., 1938. P. 34.
However, the first two groups of human desires are not flawless - they can be hypertrophied, excessively intense, knowing no limits to their satisfaction. Desire is associated with desire- increased emotional attraction to the object of desire.
Passion is a very persistent affective desire for a certain object, the need for which dominates over all other needs and gives a corresponding direction to all human life.
Passion integrates volitional and emotional drives; it can be positive and negative depending on the social value of what a person strives for. Many negative passions (to acquisitiveness, gambling, etc.) lead to personality degradation and are often a prerequisite for criminal behavior. Positive passions mobilize a person’s strength to achieve socially significant goals (for example, passion for art, science, certain types of work, etc.). “The complete absence of passions, if such could be achieved, would lead to complete stupefaction, and a person is closer to this state, the more impartial he is. Indeed, passions are the heavenly fire that animates the moral world; science and art owe their discoveries to passions, and the soul - nobility"*.
The state of obsessive attraction to a certain group of objects is called attraction.Attractions can be natural and formed in social conditions.
Natural inclinations are not always realized. They are associated with organic processes and can only be regulated by consciousness to a small extent. The drives themselves can significantly influence the organization and direction of consciousness. “The drive sets tasks for the intellect for its satisfaction and uses it as a working apparatus. It puts pressure on thinking, chains it to finding ways to satisfy itself and forces it to work in the right direction until a successful outcome is found.”
* Helvetius K. A. About the mind. P. 138.
In the series of instinctive, organic drives, the following sequence has been established in order of increasing strength of their intensity: 1) indicative reactions, 2) sexual drive, 3) hunger (food drive), 4) thirst, 5) motherhood drive.
Human instincts, unlike animal instincts, are socially conditioned. The more deeply socialized a person is, the more disciplined his drives are. Weakening of the psyche, mental degradation lead to strengthening of instinctive impulses. (So, in the structure of crime, a significant place is occupied by unbridled sexual desires, satisfied in a criminal, violent way.)
One of the main features of developed human consciousness is the ability to make reasonable choices among one’s own inclinations. To do this, the individual must rise above his drives and, distracting himself from them, make a choice between them. This choice is made by the hierarchically organized value system of the individual.
A person's motivation can be conscious and subconscious.
Conscious motivation is associated with intention. Intention(in legal terminology - “intention”) is a consciously made decision to achieve a certain goal with a clear idea of the means and methods of action.
Intention combines the urge to action and its conscious planning. Intentions, like needs, have dynamic properties - strength, tension, etc. Intentions organize a person’s behavior, ensure the arbitrariness of his actions, and act as a conscious act of behavior. The conscious justification of intention is motive.
The term "motive" translated from Latin means motivation, but not every motivation is a motive; Behavior can be motivated by feelings and attitudes. Some motives are conscious, others are not. A motive is a conscious impulse to achieve a specific goal, understood by an individual as a personal necessity.
If the concept of motivation includes all types of motivations of human behavior (including little-conscious and subconscious ones), then a motive is consciously formed, conceptually formalized motivations.
Human activity is usually motivated by several motives - a hierarchy of motives. In this case, certain motives acquire leading importance.
Leading motives give activity, its objects and conditions personal meaning - meaning.
Motives may conflict with the objective possibilities of their implementation, with the social regulation of behavior. In such cases, the socialized individual experiences either a suppression of the motive or a change in it - the search for new, socially acceptable goals of activity. (Motives should be distinguished from motivation - justifying statements about the action taken. They may not coincide with the actual motives, masking them.) All little-conscious impulsive actions are performed on the basis of an attitude (sometimes erroneously interpreted as “unconscious motives”).
Installation -a state of readiness for a certain way of behavior in certain situations; it is a neurodynamically encoded stable pattern of behavior. Attitude is the most constant, stable basis of human behavior.
There are two types of installation - general and differentiated(fixed). A general attitude arises in relation to large classes of phenomena; differentiated - in relation to individualized objects.
The attitude underlies the integrity and consistency of a person’s behavior, unites his conscious and subconscious spheres, determines the measure of a person’s possible behavior in various life situations, “the norm of his reaction.”
Attitudes underlie behavioral stereotypes that stabilize the behavior of an individual, freeing him from the need to make decisions and arbitrarily control the implementation of activities in standard situations for him (generalized in the experience of a given individual) situations. In a number of cases (with a low level of criticality of the individual), attitudes cause inertia of behavior, not Given changes in the environment, people act in a pattern.
Attitudes can be associated with various components of the activity. There are different semantic, target and operational settings.
Meaningful attitudesdetermine the personal meaning of specific objects, phenomena, readiness to act in relation to a significant object in a certain way. An individual’s semantic attitudes are formed especially intensively in the microenvironment that is reference (meaningful) for him. In tense situations, attitudes begin to dominate.
Having arisen within the framework of one activity, attitudes transfer to other areas of activity and determine the interaction of subjects with similar objects in a wide range of similar situations.
Target settingsprovide a stable direction of action, they are expressed in a tendency to complete the action under any circumstances, which sometimes leads to rigidity and inflexibility of behavior.
Operating settingsprovide psychophysiological pre-tuning of the individual to perform actions in certain ways, a consistent system of habitual operations using means familiar to the individual.
In a complex mechanism for regulating behavior, its conscious components (goals, motive, decisions, programming, choice of means of implementation) continuously interact with subconscious, attitudinal stereotypical components.
So, the incentive and goal-forming mechanism of human behavior consists of a complex set of interrelated personal factors - the orientation of the individual, his needs, the modification of which are interests, desires, aspirations, passions, drives and subconscious attitudes. The conscious component of volitional, goal-oriented behavior is the motives of behavioral acts that integrate contains the general orientation of the personality
The orientation of a person largely determines his abilities and character.
3. Human interests
The word "interest" has many meanings. You can be interested in something and be interested in something. These are different things, although undoubtedly related. We may be interested in a person in whom we are not at all interested, and we may, due to certain circumstances, be interested in a person who is not at all interesting to us.
Just as needs and, together with them, social interests - interests in the sense in which we talk about interests in the social sciences - determine “interest” in the psychological sense, determine its direction, and are its source. Being in this sense derived from public interests, interest in its psychological meaning is not identical either with public interest as a whole, or with its subjective side. Interest in the psychological sense of the word is a specific orientation of the individual, which is only indirectly determined by the awareness of its social interests.
The specificity of interest, which distinguishes it from other tendencies that express the orientation of a person, lies in the fact that interest is a concentration on a specific subject of thought, causing a desire to become more familiar with it, to penetrate deeper into it, and not to lose sight of it. Interest is a tendency or orientation of a person, which consists in the concentration of his thoughts on a specific subject. By thought we mean a complex and indecomposable formation - a directed thought, a thought-care, a thought-participation, a thought-involvement, which contains within itself a specific emotional coloring.
As an orientation of thoughts, interest differs significantly from the orientation of desires, in which the need primarily manifests itself. Interest affects the direction of attention, thoughts, thoughts; need - in drives, desires, will. A need causes a desire to, in some sense, possess an object; interest causes a desire to become familiar with it. Interests are therefore specific motives of cultural and, in particular, cognitive activity of a person. An attempt to reduce interest to a need, defining it solely as a conscious need, is untenable. Awareness of a need can arouse interest in an object that can satisfy it, but an unconscious need as such is still a need (transforming into a desire), and not an interest. Of course, in a single, diverse personality orientation, all sides are interconnected. The concentration of desires on an object usually entails a concentration of interest in it; concentrating on a subject of interest and thoughts gives rise to a specific desire to get to know the subject better, to penetrate deeper into it; but still desire and interest do not coincide.
An essential property of interest is that it is always directed at one or another object (in the broad sense of the word). If we can also talk about drives and needs in the drive stage as internal impulses that reflect the internal organic state and are initially not consciously associated with an object, then interest is necessarily an interest in this or that object, in something or in someone: There are no such thing as pointless interests.<...>The “objectivity” of interest and its consciousness are closely related; more precisely, they are two sides of the same thing; It is in the awareness of the object to which interest is directed that the conscious nature of interest is manifested first of all.
Interest is a motive that acts due to its perceived significance and emotional appeal. Each interest usually represents both aspects to some extent, but the relationship between them at different levels of consciousness may be different. When the general level of consciousness or awareness of a given interest is low, emotional attraction dominates. At this level of consciousness, to the question of why one is interested in something, there can be only one answer: one is interested because one is interested, one likes it because one likes it.
The higher the level of consciousness, the greater the role in interest played by awareness of the objective significance of the tasks in which a person is involved. However, no matter how high and strong the consciousness of the objective significance of the corresponding tasks is, it cannot exclude the emotional appeal of what arouses interest. In the absence of more or less immediate emotional attraction, there will be a consciousness of importance, obligation, duty, but there will be no interest.
The emotional state itself caused by interest, or, more precisely, the emotional component of interest, has a specific character, different, in particular, from the one that accompanies or in which the need is expressed: when the need is not met, it is difficult to live; when interests are not fed or there are none, life is boring. Obviously, specific manifestations in the emotional sphere are associated with interest.
Being conditioned by emotional appeal and perceived significance, interest manifests itself primarily in attention. Being an expression of the general orientation of the individual, interest covers all mental processes - perception, memory, thinking. By directing them along a certain direction, interest at the same time activates the activity of the individual. When a person works with interest, he is known to work easier and more productively.
Interest in a particular subject - science, music, sports - encourages corresponding activities. Thus, interest gives rise to inclination or turns into it. We distinguish between interest as a focus on a subject, prompting us to engage in it, and inclination as a focus on a corresponding activity. While we differentiate, we at the same time connect them in the most intimate way. But still they cannot be recognized as identical. Thus, in one person or another, interest in technology may be combined with a lack of inclination towards the activities of an engineer, some aspect of which is unattractive to him; Thus, within the unity, a contradiction between interest and inclination is also possible. However, since the object to which the activity is directed and the activity directed at this object are inextricably linked and transform into each other, interest and inclination are also interconnected and it is often difficult to establish a line between them.
Interests differ primarily in content; it most of all determines their social value. One's interests are directed toward social work, science or art, another's interests are toward collecting stamps or fashion; these are, of course, not equal interests.
In interest in a particular object, a distinction is usually made between direct and indirect interest. They speak of having direct interest when a student is interested in the study itself, the subject being studied, when he is driven by the desire for knowledge; they talk about indirect interest when it is directed not at knowledge as such, but at something related to it, for example, at the advantages that an educational qualification can provide... The ability to show interest in science, art, and public affairs, regardless of personal benefit is one of the most valuable properties of a person. However, it is completely wrong to contrast direct interest and indirect interest. On the one hand, any direct interest is usually mediated by the consciousness of the importance, significance, value of a given object or matter; on the other hand, no less important and valuable than the ability to show interest, free from personal gain, is the ability to do something that is not of immediate interest, but is necessary, important, and socially significant. Actually, if you truly realize the significance of the work you are doing, then it will inevitably become interesting; thus, indirect interest turns into direct interest.
Interests, further, may differ in levels of formalization. The amorphous level is expressed in diffuse, undifferentiated, more or less easily aroused (or not aroused) interest in everything in general and nothing in particular.
The scope of interests is related to their distribution. For some, their interest is entirely concentrated on one subject or a narrowly limited area, which leads to one-sided development of the personality and is at the same time the result of such one-sided development.<...>Others have two or even several centers around which their interests are grouped. Only with a very successful combination, namely when these interests lie in completely different areas (for example, one in practical activity or science, and the other in art) and differ significantly from each other in strength, this bifocality of interests does not cause any complications . Otherwise, it can easily lead to duality, which will hinder activity in both one and the other direction: a person will not enter into anything entirely, with genuine passion, and will not succeed anywhere. Finally, a situation is also possible in which interests, quite broad and multifaceted, are concentrated in one area and, moreover, so connected by the most essential aspects of human activity that a fairly branched system of interests can be grouped around this single core. It is this structure of interests that is obviously most favorable for the comprehensive development of the individual and at the same time the concentration that is necessary for successful activity.<...>
The different scope and distribution of interests, expressed in one or another of their breadth and structure, are combined with one or another of their strength or activity. In some cases, interest can only be expressed in some preferential direction, or turn, of the personality, as a result of which a person is more likely to pay attention to this or that object if it arises in addition to his efforts. In other cases, the interest may be so strong that the person actively seeks to satisfy it. There are many examples (M.V. Lomonosov, A.M. Gorky) when the interest in science or art among people living in conditions in which it could not be satisfied was so great that they rebuilt their lives and went to the greatest sacrifices, just to satisfy this interest. In the first case they talk about passive, in the second - about active interest; but passive and active interests are not so much a qualitative difference between two types of interests as quantitative differences in their strength or intensity, allowing for many gradations. True, this quantitative difference, reaching a certain measure, turns into a qualitative one, expressed in the fact that in one case interest arouses only involuntary attention, in the second it becomes a direct motive for real practical actions. The difference between passive and active interest is not absolute: passive interest easily turns into active, and vice versa.
The strength of interest is often, although not necessarily, combined with its persistence. With very impulsive, emotional, unstable natures, it happens that one or another interest, while it dominates, is intense and active, but the time of its dominance is short-lived: one interest is quickly replaced by another. The stability of interest is expressed in the duration during which it retains its strength: time serves as a quantitative measure of the stability of interest. Associated with strength, the stability of interest is fundamentally determined not so much by it as by depth, i.e. the degree of connection between interest and the main content and characteristics of the personality. Thus, the first prerequisite for the very possibility of a person having stable interests is the presence of a core, a general life line, for a given individual. If it is not there, there are no sustainable interests; if it exists, those interests that are associated with it will be stable, partly expressing it, partly shaping it.
At the same time, interests, usually interconnected in bundles or, rather, in dynamic systems, are arranged as if in nests and differ in depth, since among them there are always basic, more general ones, and derivative, more specific ones. A more general interest is usually also more stable.
The presence of such a general interest does not mean, of course, that this interest, for example in painting or music, is always relevant; it only means that he easily becomes so (one can be generally interested in music, but at the moment have no desire to listen to it). Common interests are latent interests that are easily actualized.
The stability of these common, generalized interests does not mean their rigidity. It is precisely because of their generalization that the stability of common interests can be perfectly combined with their lability, mobility, flexibility, and variability. In different situations, the same general interest appears as a different interest in relation to changed specific conditions. Thus, interests in the general orientation of the individual form a system of mobile, changeable, dynamic tendencies with a moving center of gravity.
Interest, i.e. the direction of attention and thoughts can be caused by everything that is in one way or another connected with feeling, with the sphere of human emotions. Our thoughts easily focus on the matter that is dear to us, on the person we love.
Formed on the basis of needs, interest in the psychological sense of the word is in no way limited to objects directly related to needs. Already among monkeys, curiosity is clearly manifested, not directly subordinated to food or any other organic need, a craving for everything new, a tendency to manipulate every object that comes across, which gives rise to talk about an indicative, exploratory reflex or impulse. This curiosity, the ability to pay attention to new objects that are not at all related to the satisfaction of needs, has biological significance, being an essential prerequisite for the satisfaction of needs.<.. >
The monkey's tendency to manipulate any object turned into curiosity in humans, which over time took the form of theoretical activity to obtain scientific knowledge. A person can be interested in everything new, unexpected, unknown, unsolved, problematic - everything that poses tasks for him and requires his work of thought. Being motives and incentives for activities aimed at creating science and art, interests are at the same time the result of this activity. Interest in technology was formed in a person with the emergence and development of technology, interest in fine arts - with the emergence and development of visual activity, and interest in science - with the emergence and development of scientific knowledge.
In the course of individual development, interests are formed as children come into increasingly conscious contact with the world around them and, in the process of learning and upbringing, master the historically established and developing culture. Interests are both a prerequisite for learning and its result. Education is based on the interests of children, and it also shapes them. Interests therefore serve, on the one hand, as a means that the teacher uses to make teaching more effective, on the other hand, interests and their formation are the goal of pedagogical work; the formation of full-fledged interests is the most essential task of learning.
Interests are formed and consolidated in the process of activity through which a person enters a particular area or subject. Therefore, young children do not have any established stable interests or channels that would determine their direction for any length of time. They usually have only a certain mobile, easily excited and quickly fading direction.
The blurred and unstable direction of the child’s interests largely reflects the interests of the social environment. Those interests that are associated with children's activities acquire relatively greater stability. As a result, children of senior preschool age develop “seasonal” interests, hobbies that last for a certain, not very long period, then being replaced by others. To develop and maintain active interest in a particular activity, it is very important that the activity produces a materialized result, a new product, and that its individual links clearly appear to the child as steps leading to the goal.
Significantly new conditions for the development of a child’s interests arise when he or she enters school and begins learning various subjects.
During educational work, the interest of schoolchildren is often fixed on a subject that is especially well presented and in which children make especially tangible, obvious successes to themselves. Much here depends on the teacher. But at first these are mostly short-lived interests. A high school student begins to develop somewhat stable interests. The early emergence of stable interests that last a lifetime is observed only in cases where there is a bright, early-determined talent. Such a talent, successfully developed, becomes a vocation; realized as such, it determines the stable direction of basic interests.
The most significant thing in the development of a teenager’s interests is: 1) the beginning of establishing a range of interests, united in a small number of interconnected systems that acquire a certain stability; 2) switching interests from the private and concrete (collecting at school age) to the abstract and general, in particular the growth of interest in issues of ideology and worldview; 3) the simultaneous emergence of interest in the practical application of acquired knowledge, in issues of practical life; 4) growing interest in the mental experiences of other people and especially one’s own (youth diaries); 5) beginning differentiation and specialization of interests. Focus of interests on a certain field of activity, profession - technology, a certain scientific field, literature, art, etc. occurs under the influence of the entire system of conditions in which the adolescent develops.
The dominant interests are manifested in predominantly readable literature - in the so-called reader's interests. Teenagers have a significant interest in technical and popular science literature, as well as in travel. Interest in novels, and in fiction in general, increases mainly in adolescence, which is partly explained by the interest in inner experiences and personal moments characteristic of this age. Interests at the stage of their formation are labile and more susceptible to the influence of environmental conditions. Thus, the interest in technology usually inherent in teenagers has especially increased in connection with the industrialization of the country.
Interests are not a product of the child’s seemingly self-contained nature. They arise from contact with the surrounding world; The people around them have a special influence on their development. Conscious use of interests in the pedagogical process in no way means that teaching should be adapted to the existing interests of students. Pedagogical process, choice of subjects, etc. are based on the objectives of education, on objective considerations, and interests must be directed in accordance with these objectively justified goals. Interests cannot be fetishized or ignored: they must be taken into account and formed.
The development of interests is accomplished partly by switching them: based on an existing interest, they develop the one that is needed. But this, of course, does not mean that the formation of interests is always a transfer of existing interests from one subject to another or a transformation of the same interest. A person has new interests that replace dying, old ones, as he becomes involved in new tasks in the course of his life and realizes in a new way the significance of the tasks that life sets for him; The development of interests is not a closed process. Along with the switching of existing interests, new interests can arise without a direct successive connection with the old ones, by including the individual in the interests of the new team as a result of the new relationships that he develops with others. The formation of interests in children and adolescents depends on the entire system of conditions that determine the formation of personality. Skillful pedagogical influence is of particular importance for the formation of objectively valuable interests. The older the child, the greater the role that his awareness of the social significance of the tasks that are set before him can play.
Of the interests that are formed in adolescence, the interests that play a significant role in choosing a profession and determining a person’s future life path are of great importance. Careful pedagogical work on the formation of interests, especially in adolescence and youth, at the time when a profession is being chosen, admission to a special higher educational institution, which determines the future path of life, is an extremely important and responsible task.<...>
4. Value orientations of the individual
Values -this is the core of the personality structure, determining its direction, the highest level of regulation of the social behavior of the individual .
The development of values occurs in a rather complex way. Some values were formed historically, over many generations, and were constantly reinforced by the lives of people, ensuring their survival and development. Freedom, peace, cooperation, equality, democracy are those social values that are considered desirable in our culture. These values are not fixed, they change, but the process of this change is very long.
An individual's values are mainly formed in early childhood. Their source is, first of all, those people who surround the child. The first ideas about what is right and what is false are most often formed under the influence of the behavior and opinions of parents, and the basis of value orientations, as a rule, is laid within the family. Seeing the behavior of parents in calm and tense moments, in moments of grief and joy, comparing their actions and words, children begin to imitate a lot. Through the world of the family, they try to understand the differences between good and bad, good and evil, they are looking for ways to overcome childhood problems. Up to a certain age, a child’s views are very similar to what his parents act and say. Thus, the awareness of good and bad, right and wrong forms in the child specific values that are unique to him. Next, the values are built into a certain structure and become a value system or orientation of the individual. As a child grows up, he is increasingly exposed to other value systems, and this inevitably changes some, and sometimes many, of his values.
It is in adolescence that a stable circle of interests begins to form, which is the psychological basis of the value orientations of adolescents. There is a switching of interests from the particular and concrete to the abstract and general, and there is an increase in interest in the issue of worldview, religion, morality and ethics. Interest in one’s own psychological experiences and the experiences of other people develops. In turn, a set of values established in the structure of a particular personality forms the value orientations of the individual or the value structure of the individual.
Value orientations- the most important component of a person’s consciousness, significantly influencing the perception of the environment, attitude towards society, a social group, and a person’s ideas about himself. As an element of the personality structure, they reflect her internal readiness to take action to satisfy her needs and goals, and give direction to her behavior in all areas of activity.
The relevance of the problem of the influence of group inclusion on the formation of a person’s value orientations is associated with solving problems in the formation of a person as a bearer of values in modern education. Effective training and education is unthinkable without psychological knowledge about the patterns of personality development, about the peculiarities of the transition of society's values into individual values.
Already known studies of inclusion in the external social environment are mainly devoted to the analysis of the problem of the individual’s inclusion, his functional states and the influence of inclusion on certain psychological phenomena associated with the individual. It seems necessary to deepen the study of the psychology of a group associated with its inclusion in the surrounding social environment. Scientific analysis of the inclusion of a group and its influence on the individual, on the formation of his value orientations, as well as the value orientations of the group, makes it possible to deepen the understanding of group phenomena, reveal group potentials, and will deepen the study of one of the most important problems of modern social psychology - the problem of socio-psychological determination of psychological makeup personality.
As is known, one of the most important formations in the structure of a person’s orientation, which determines his attitude towards the objects of the social environment, is value orientations. The study of the essence and functions of value orientations is part of a broader problem described by the concept of a personality’s dispositional system, which is one of the essential regulators of an individual’s behavior and which is formed in the process of its activity through the reflection and assignment of social values.
To date, there is no consensus on the definition of the concept of “value” and in modern psychological literature there are two main approaches. In the first, the concept of “value” refers to socially approved or disapproved means of organizing and regulating human behavior, acting as an external condition or a set of socially defined self-justifications for one’s own activity, and in the second, “value” is understood as an ideal reflection of people’s social relations, as a special case of the process of objectification social relations in social institutions and structures. From the point of view of genesis and functions performed, values are of a social nature. The individual value system has a hierarchical structure. Along with other factors, values predetermine the formation of a personality’s dispositional system.
The studies of foreign and domestic authors dealing with the problem of dispositions mainly examine the characteristics of social attitudes. Formations of higher levels are studied to a lesser extent - the orientation of the individual and other elements of the dispositional system that have similar characteristics to the social attitude of the individual.
The structural level, the functional aspect of the orientation process, was theoretically determined on the basis of the leading psychological and pedagogical principles about the individual as a subject of the value development of reality.
Orientation is a process of personal development in which the formation, change, integration of its components leads to higher integrity in stages. The accumulation of development components, their preservation, enrichment and reorganization, the division of their functions, hierarchy and integration ensure the emergence of new structural formations and new functions of the value-based Image of the World, the Image of “I”, and the Image of the Future.
The process of orientation can be considered as the ascent of the individual to the values of society on the basis of the dialectical law of the rise of needs. The pedagogical projection of the law of increasing needs allows us to characterize the essence of the process of orientation of schoolchildren in the world of values as an independent movement of the individual, adequate to the leading values of society, to define the value function of education as the need to transform values into the life of the school and actualize the personal needs of schoolchildren, taking into account their age and the social situation of their development, mastered values.
Of fundamental importance for the study of the orientation process are the conclusions of complex psychological studies that answer the question of what in the personality structure is unchangeable and what is relatively changeable. The practical significance of this issue is obvious. It lies in the fact that only by influencing relatively changeable personal formations can one effectively solve the problems of education, formation, development and self-development of the individual.
When analyzing the concept of development, in contrast to simple change, the need for irreversibility and directionality in the patterns of changes that occur is emphasized.
The problem of personal changes is developed within the framework of personality psychology and the life path of the individual.
K. A. Abulkhanova-Slavskaya made a special attempt to distinguish between personality changes and personality development. Considering personality as a stable system of relationships characteristic of it, she believes that personality development is associated with basic personal relationships; these relationships are relatively stable and constitute the “core” of the personality; the change in these relations is not partial, as with external, random changes, but is carried out in a systematic manner. Personality changes in the process of its life activity occur both under the influence of time, circumstances and “critical”, “turning” events in a person’s life, and under the influence of the developing essential forces of the subject himself.
The orientation process can be viewed from different perspectives. It can be characterized as an action consisting of elements: an object (landmark) towards which the action is directed; the objective side, i.e. the method (method) of performing an action; the subjective side, i.e. the subject’s attitude to the action and its result, and the subject himself performing the action. For pedagogy, in our opinion, a dynamic approach is productive, allowing us to study human behavior and activity in development. From this point of view, orientation is a process that unfolds both in space and in time. It can be assumed that the process of orientation is complex, contradictory and at the same time natural, developing “in a spiral.” This is a process that itself prepares the conditions for its subsequent development and serves, in some way, as the cause of its own self-propulsion. Long-term observations and analysis of teachers' own and teachers' experiences suggested that the orientation process consists of a series of phases.
phase - the appropriation of society's values by the individual. It ensures the creation of a valuable “image of the world.” On this basis, the formation of a value attitude towards the phenomena of the surrounding reality occurs, the formation and development of value orientations of the individual in all spheres of his life. The theoretical justification for isolating this phase of the orientation process comes from research on the problem of belief formation.
phase - personality transformation based on the assignment of values. This is a period in the development of the orientation process when a person focuses attention on himself, self-knowledge and self-esteem occur, and the image of “I” is formed. At this stage, in the process of developing a value-based attitude to the world, self-awareness is interwoven, the process acquires qualitatively new characteristics: revaluation of values, their greater differentiation, stabilization. The theoretical basis for proposing and justifying this phase of orientation is the psychological theory of “Self-concept”.
phase - forecast, goal setting, design, which ensures the formation of an “image of the future”. At this stage of development of the orientation process, coordination, systematization and building of a hierarchy, one’s own scale of values, and a system of value orientations of the individual take place. The deepening of the value relationship to the surrounding reality and the process of orientation acquires new characteristics - spatio-temporal three-dimensionality, value orientations and self-awareness rush into the future - a life perspective is formed. The theoretical basis for advancing this position is the theory of forecasting.
It is important to note that at all stages of the development of orientation as a process, all phases work synchronously. However, their conditional division makes it possible to penetrate into the mechanisms of value development of reality, the student’s acceptance of himself as an intrinsic value and to see the components of close, medium and distant personal prospects.
The completeness of the phases of the orientation process depends on many factors: on the range of value cognition, on the ability to predict, the depth of self-awareness, and reflection. Moreover, the most tangible manifestations are the age-related manifestations (age-related capabilities) of the student. In this regard, it should be said that the most perfect and open to observation are those characteristics of the phase that appear coinciding, resonating in the process of orientation with sensitive new formations of age. Thus, the phase of appropriation of values is most clearly and clearly observed in primary school age, the transformation phase in adolescence, and the prognosis in adolescence.
We believe that at all levels of development of the process of personal orientation the same value mechanisms function: search - evaluation - choice - projection, however, at different phases we can see different degrees of workload of individual mechanisms: the assignment of values is ensured to a greater extent by search and evaluation, at subsequent stages are choice and projection. By defining the conceptual essence of the term mechanism, we emphasize both its psychological basis and their pedagogical essence, and, consequently, the real opportunity to influence the development of these personal mechanisms in specially organized situations of a student’s life.
I believe that the peculiarities of the development of the orientation process are determined both by the individual conditions of personality development, the nature of its life activity, and age-related patterns. However, the stages of the orientation process may be closer to or may be significantly distant from the stages of the student’s age-related development, which is why pedagogy needs a special study of the features, contradictions, and tendencies of schoolchildren’s orientation toward socially significant values in the educational process.
In the most general form, the process of orientation can be presented as a living space expanding over time, in which a person builds and acquires a certain “trajectory of his movement” in accordance with guidelines: the values of the external world and the values of self-knowledge, self-esteem, self-development. A person makes a choice of life goals, plans, prospects on the basis of knowledge of circumstances and himself, constantly evaluating, comparing and juxtaposing both himself and other people, turning to the past, living in the present, focusing on the future. The value orientations of the individual, thus, provide a core, a common line, a certain axis that balances actions, behavior, activities that deviate in one direction or another from the general core, line, direction (see diagram).
This process is not a one-time acquisition of quality, it is extended over time, has its own stages, consistently correlated with the general growth and age-related development of a person, the formation of his personal properties.
I am the phase of the process - the assignment of values by the individual, the formation of the Image of the World. The 2nd phase of the process is the transformation of personality based on values, the formation of the Image of “I”. 3rd phase of the process - design - self-design, formation of an image of the future.
The proposed diagram of the orientation process, firstly, illustrates such a feature of orientation as the presence of an object-subject relationship between the individual and society, mediated by the presence of individual needs and the values of society. The needs of the individual, located on the horizontal plane, can tend to rise based on their approach to values, forming in the individual a certain value “axis of consciousness” (the term of Yadov and Zdravomyslov) - value orientations. The development of value orientations of the individual based on the assignment of values, their harmonization with rising needs, in turn, determine the direction of consciousness, self-awareness, and, consequently, the life perspective, which is the value vector of personal development, translated into the goal of life, which completes the personal self-determination of a person in the world of work , communication, art, knowledge - in the surrounding reality and in oneself.
Secondly, the proposed scheme allows us to see in the process of orientation the multiplicity of options for the interaction of the needs and values of an individual. Confirms that the chaotic nature of a person’s aspirations is restrained by the boundary of their interaction with values. Value to a certain extent stabilizes the need or gives it direction of development.
Thirdly, the diagram makes it possible to record such a characteristic of orientation as processivity. By incorporating the time factor, indicating the extent of development, it determines both the spatial and temporal lines of orientation development. In this case, the temporal extent of orientation is consistent with age-related changes in the student’s personality. However, we believe that the degree to which a person is oriented in the surrounding reality and in knowing himself in the future does not depend entirely on the person’s age.
The presence of an orientation toward socially significant values characterizes personal maturity and independence, which may not occur not only during school years, but also later.
We believe that the determining factor in this case is the interaction of needs and values, and the less they rise along the vertical line, the less dependent they are on values, the shorter the perspective. At the same time, by incorporating the time factor, we determine the extent of personality development.
Fourthly, the diagram reveals such a feature of the orientation process as the expansion of the space of life activity, and, consequently, a wider range of interaction of needs and values, which also implies an expansion of the range, freedom of search for choice, evaluation, projection - all mechanisms of orientation.
Fifthly, reflecting the dynamics of orientation, the diagram allows us to see that the elevation of the individual’s needs for values does not proceed linearly, in a straight line, but in a spiral manner - it has recessions, turns, and elevations.
Sixthly, the diagram gives a visual representation of the phases inherent in each turn of the spiral (stage of orientation): the phases of appropriation, transformation and design, and in general - the gradual ascent of the individual to values - as if determining procedural continuity in the development of orientation. Each stage is a certain completed cycle of orientation, a certain qualitative originality of all components that change in orientation: values, needs, personal mechanisms, the nature of interaction, personal new formations. And, finally, a schematic representation of orientation in this form allows us to consider that the process is continuous, it does not end, does not break off at some turn, just as spiritual needs do not have their saturation as they develop and rise to values. Consequently, it cannot be assumed that by the time a student graduates from school, the orientation process should be completed. It would be more correct to assume that during school life, each student can, in the process of orientation, “take his height” - rise to a certain level from orientation in the value development of reality.
The proposed abstract version of the visual representation of the orientation process reflects only its most general characteristics, which do not reveal the factors influencing orientation.
Among the factors that most influence the value development of the surrounding reality by schoolchildren, the leading one is content. We believe that the content of schoolchildren’s orientation is always determined (according to the universal law of pedagogy) by the sociocultural situation of the development of society. Currently, the set of socially significant values is determined by the priority of universal human values and includes values that are consistently preserved in all social systems - truth, goodness (humanism) and beauty; globally and personally significant value - life; especially relevant for the current stage of development of society - Fatherland; the priority value that ensures the progress and prosperity of society and the individual is labor.
One of the most important problems of modern philosophy, sociological and psychological research is the problem of the structural structure and regulatory functions of value orientations.
Analysis of their structure includes the relationship between meaning-forming and stimulating functions, content and dynamic aspects, current and promising semantic formations.
The problem of personal meanings, their formation, and interaction with each other is one of the most interesting in psychology and attracts the attention of researchers from a variety of schools and directions, where personal values play a crucial role in the self-regulation of a subject who is actively related to the external and internal world. Turning to meaning-forming structures of a higher hierarchical rank - personal values, V.V. Stolin (1983) includes an emotional-value attitude in the plane of a person’s self-awareness. Meaningful formations exist not only in a conscious, but often also in an unconscious form; they form, in the words of L.S. Vygotsky, the “hidden” plane of consciousness. A person’s understanding of the meaning of a particular relationship to the world is not given to him directly and automatically, but requires complex and specific internal activity, an assessment of one’s life, and the solution of a special “meaning problem” that arises only at a certain stage of development of consciousness (A.N. Leontiev, 1971).
In domestic psychology, the tradition of understanding personality is supported based on the ontological foundations of its life activity: external and internal, individual and social are understood in their inseparability and unity (S.L. Rubinshtein, A.N. Leontyev, F.E. Vasilyuk, D.A. Leontyev and others).
So, values, being a product of the life activity of society and social groups, occupy a special place in the personality structure of each specific subject. Acting as sources of meaning formation that are autonomous in relation to needs (according to psychological laws, formation and phenomenology), they “connect” individual life activity to the life activity of society, “illuminate the life meaning of objects and phenomena of reality from the point of view of sustainable interests of the development of the social whole, refracted and comprehended by the subject in as value guidelines of his life, are formulated as ideals, models of what should be, setting a spectrum of invariant limiting parameters of desirable transformations of reality” (D.A. Leontyev 1987; p. 182).
All objects of nature have, as it were, a double existence - natural, material and value-based, axiogenic. Hence the different approaches to their development. If, during scientific and theoretical development, an object is considered as it is outside and independently of the consciousness of the subject, then during value development, what is its significance for satisfying the needs and interests of a person.
The difficulty of determining the essence of the phenomenon “value” is associated with its polysemy, with its objective features. In the literature, there are more than a hundred definitions of the concept of “value”, in which various approaches and aspects of this problem are proposed for consideration.
In the essence of value, in our opinion, it is necessary to highlight two points:
connection with the individual as an assessing subject;
sanctioning of a value by society or a group (when this condition is met, values are deployed as norms and ideals).
A number of domestic authors are characterized by the attribution of value to the sphere of what should be, which acts as a norm, goal, ideal, but is not implemented in real life. According to O.M. Bakuradze, “the judgment of value is teleological in nature, i.e. indicates a state defined by a goal. Value is not what is, but what should be.” Close to the also named position of I.S. Barsky, who notes that “values are mainly the ideals of public life, and on this basis, personal activity”; AND I. Razin, understands value as “an independent invariant of evaluative experience in relation to an individual subject, objectified in artificial forms of specific objectivity.”
The process of transformation of social values into personal ones is carried out through the moment of practical involvement of the subject in social relations, in a specific “microenvironment” - a social group that is a “relay” of the values of society. On the one hand, it is a mediating link in the inclusion of the subject in collective activity, in the process of assimilation and implementation of the values of a particular society, i.e. provides the functions of regulating the social behavior of an individual in accordance with the values and goals of the development of society and the functioning of social groups (L.P. Bueva, 1968; G.A. Pogosyan, 1979, etc.). On the other hand, it opens up for the subject the possibility of social development (A.I. Dontsov, 1974; E.A. Arutyunyan, 1979, etc.) or, at least, social adaptation, for example, protective identification with a group, which is especially relevant in conditions of social crisis (V.A. Yadov, 1993).
The mechanism for personal assimilation of group values is social identification as the process of formation of a person’s social identity, which is not reducible to group (role) identity (see, for example, Yu.L. Kachanov, N.A. Shmatko, 1993). Social identity is one of the mechanisms of subjective-personal mastery of social reality, which underlies the formation of a stable system of personal meanings, a stable structure of relations with the world (Leontyev A.N., 1975).
Value as a property of an object or phenomenon is inherent in it not by nature, not due to the internal structure of the object, but because it is the bearer of certain social relations, being involved in the sphere of human social existence. However, given to an object or phenomenon by a specific individual, it is individual, and therefore there can be as many evaluations of the same object as there are evaluating subjects. The real basis for their diversity is the individual characteristics of the assessing subject, the specificity of his needs and interests. At the same time, the assessment is a reflection of objective reality. On this basis, repeated assessments create norms and principles of any sociocultural entity (groups, society as a whole), which represent stable assessments in their impact on human behavior. They have a huge “personal meaning” for the subject, since “Psychological meaning is what has become the property of my consciousness: a generalized reflection of reality, developed by humanity and recorded in the form of a concept, knowledge, or even in the form of a skill as a generalized “mode of action,” norms of behavior, etc. .P. A person finds a ready-made, historically established system of meanings and masters it: “The actual psychological fact of my life is that I master or do not master a given meaning, whether I master it or not, and how much I master it and what it becomes for me.” , for my personality, the latter depends on what subjective personal meaning it has for me” (Leontyev, 1972, p. 290).
If A.N. Leontyev in his theory uses the concept of “personal meaning” as similar to the concept of “attitude” (D.N. Uznadze) or “disposition” (V.A. Yadov), L.I. Bozhovich (1968) put forward the position that the system-forming feature of the personality structure is the “internal position of the personality,” otherwise its direction, which is mainly an emotional phenomenon. B.D. Parygin (1971) developed the concept of mentality, combining the conscious and emotional components of the holistic orientation of the personality into a more general category.
Orientation is the most important aspect of a personality, determining its social and moral value. This is the integral phenomenon that reveals the tendentiousness of behavior and characterizes the individual as a subject of relationships.
Direction finds its manifestation in the internal elements of the personality: needs, attitudes, value orientations, interests, goals, ideals. All this relates to the motivational sphere of the individual, that is, it can encourage him to act.
It is important that the behavior of an individual is determined not by any one motive, but by their complex hierarchical system, the generalized social characteristic of which is its direction. She, as defined by G.L. Smirnov, “there is a certain generalizing principle that covers all spheres, all “floors” of the human psyche - from needs to ideals” (G.L. Smirnov, 1980).
An approach to personal values from the point of view of relationship analysis was developed by V.N. Myasishchev. According to him, objects and phenomena of reality associated with a person through social relations act as objectively included in her life world and in her activities, in which they acquire personal significance and value.
The concept of a person’s value orientation arises to explain socially significant behavior. But the question of the origins of this concept is not resolved unambiguously among psychologists. According to a number of authors (Kolb U.L. Changing the meaning of the concept of values in modern sociological theory // Becker G., Boskov A. Modern sociological theory. - M., 1961. P. 113-157) the history of the category “value orientation identical to history “attitude” (social attitudes). Lyubimova T.B. and S.I. Popov associate the introduction of the concept of “value orientation” in social and psychological sciences with the theory of T. Parsons.
In world psychology, there is a huge amount of work devoted to values and value orientations, and their hierarchy is studied (Cantril, 1965; Kluckhohn 1951; Rokeach 1973). Expressing certain personality qualities, value orientation is at the same time a means of realizing certain social goals. The normative-value approach to studying the socio-political mentality of society comes from E. Durkheim, T. Parsons, M. Weber, A. Marshall, V. Pareto. American scientists have been studying this issue for many years: W. Thomas, F. Znaniecki, J. Mead. They are based on the idea that the determining force for the development and transformation of society is the divergence of the goals and interests of people or certain relevant groups. Within the framework of this approach, the general fundamental question of the nature of interests and the way the acting subject perceives them is explored. E. Durkheim (1900,1912, 1914) believed that the basis of society, which integrates it, is social consciousness: common beliefs, values and norms. The weakening of common beliefs and feelings threatens the disintegration of society, its collapse. Durkheim presented the power of social consciousness and its impact on the individual as the most important means of ensuring the stability of the social system and its normal functioning.
In most modern studies, values are viewed from a socio-psychological angle and are presented as a social phenomenon, as a product of the life of society and social groups. (A.I. Dontsov 1975, D.A. Leontyev 1988, Ajzen, Fishbein 1975,1980; Rokeach 1968,1973).
Thus, according to Rokeach, value is a stable belief that a certain way of behavior or existence is individually or socially preferable to, or along with, any other way of behavior or existence in a similar situation. A value system is a stable set of beliefs. Identifying three types of beliefs: existential, evaluative and prognostic, Rokeach classifies values as the last, third type, which allows one to navigate the desirability or undesirability of behavior (operational, instrumental values) and existence (semantic, terminal values).
Let's correlate the concept of a personality's central focus with the concept of attitude. This term is most often understood as “a dynamic state of readiness for a certain form of response (Asmolov “Activity and Attitude”). The mechanism of action of the value components of consciousness on the behavior of an individual does not fit into a rigid scheme of cause-and-effect relationships. In addition, when characterizing an attitude, researchers more often highlight its dynamic characteristics: energetic and activity-directing principles, “activity stabilizer.” CO refers rather to the cognitive structures of consciousness and influences behavior indirectly.
Some domestic works (see, for example, Popova, 1984), based on Marxist methodology, believed that the internal predisposition of a subject to accept or reject value orientations is determined primarily by economic and class dispositions. Mainly, attitudes towards studies, professional activities, homeland, material well-being, and moral values were studied.
Thus, the value orientations of an individual are formed when the individual internalizes group (social) ideals and principles, in the process of socialization. Reviewed by L.S. Vygotsky (1983) mutual transitions of the plans of external speech as speech for others, internal speech as speech for oneself and thinking, as implying the emergence of thought from the motivating sphere of consciousness, allowed us to say that communication plans should not be understood only as external forms of speech reflection, expression , naming or communicating thoughts. Communication helps to comprehend one’s own personal meanings, which cannot be represented as “messaging” or “naming” them. The translation of the plan of individual representation of meanings into the plan of external speech also presupposes the connection to personal semantic structures of plans of supra-individual meanings, including normative value scales that were previously only “known.” Being a function of the social environment, value orientations are at the same time a holistic characteristic that constitutes the essence of personality and reveals internal tendencies towards its existence and formation (Dontsov 1975), in contrast to the statement, for example, by D. Gurney that “the price of social acceptance is conformism and loss of independence” (Chudnovsky 1971). Personal values that determine behavior in cases where an individual has a range of possibilities act as functionally autonomous in relation to the needs of the sources of meaning formation. Values are formed as ideals, that is, models of what should be, defining a spectrum of invariant limiting parameters of desired transformations of reality.
The connection between value orientations and social attitudes (attitudes) has a long history and has been worked out in great detail (Shikhirev 1973, Yadov 1974, Asmolov, Kovalchuk 1977; Nadirashvili 1978; Thomas, Znaniecki 1918-1920; Thurstone 1930; Ostrom, Unpshaw 1968; Allport 1935; Sarnoff 1960; Sherif, Hovland 1961; Kelman 1974; Their dynamism: the ability to actualize and change their tension, the ability to fade and reproduce is again explored in the works of V.G. Aseeva.
The leading role of value orientations in the formation and development of dynamic processes of consciousness is noted (Antsyferova 1992; Kravchenko). Important ideas about the dynamics of consciousness were developed in the works of A. Bergson (1914). He considers the living, continuous, constantly changing fluidity of mental reality to be the basis of mental life. This fluidity appears as a stream of “closely penetrating images”, as a change of feelings, forming “the incessant melody of our inner life”, as a transition into each other of mental states, each of which contains what precedes it and prepares the next one (with .179). By analogy with A. Bergson, who argued that in the form of fluidity of mental states, a continuous change in personality occurs, because “every mental state reflects the personality as a whole,” we can talk about reflection in the mental state of consciousness and, therefore, about a continuous, fluid change in consciousness, “stream of consciousness” (James, 1991). Putting forward the thesis about the continuity of consciousness, about the “continuity” of the personality, which is always aware of its continuity with certain parts of the past, as “the only correct psychological method, James proposed the analysis of integral, specific states of consciousness that replace each other.”
A procedural approach to the analysis of the psyche and consciousness, developed by S.L. Rubinstein and his followers, turned out to be quite fruitful for the study of not only explicitly recognized mechanisms (for example, solving intellectual problems), but also deeper personal structures, the development of motivation, self-esteem and other “subtle movements of the soul” (Rubinstein 1946; Brushlinsky 1983; 1988; Abulkhanova-Slavskaya, Brushlinsky 1989).
Awareness, explication of basic value attitudes, their objectification into value orientations removes barriers between the actual and the potential, and contributes to the expansion and complexity of the categorical structure of consciousness. At the levels of mature consciousness, this dynamics is embodied in the ordering and reordering of one’s inner world.
Historically, the concept of “value orientations” (VA) of an individual developed as a concept that reveals the connection between “individual” and “social” in the human mind, as a unity of cognitive and affective processes. The CO system forms the substantive basis for the motivation of behavior and expresses the internal basis of the individual’s relationship with reality.
Value orientations are a broad system of value relations of an individual, therefore they manifest themselves as a selective and preferential attitude not to individual objects and phenomena, but to their totality, that is, they express the general orientation of the individual towards certain types of social values. Value orientations are not always implemented directly in activity, controlling the general, “strategic” approach to the content of activity, forms of individual behavior, representing the supporting criteria for an individual to make vital decisions. They are distinguished from attitudes, first of all, by the level of generalization of the disposition object. Value orientations unfold in goals, ideals, interests, life plans, principles, beliefs; they are the formation of an ideological and goal plan, the general line of a person’s life. They find their manifestation in verbalized programs and real behavior of people.
The system of stable value orientations of an individual is an indicator of what can be expected from an individual. The socio-political position, the spiritual world of an individual can be judged by the achievement of what values she directs her efforts, what objects are the most significant for her, that is, value orientations act as a general indicator of the orientation of interests, needs, demands of the individual, social position and level of spiritual development
To overcome the existing contradiction between the objective need to study the psychological content of value orientations and the insufficiency of methods adequate to this goal, it is necessary to solve the following problems. First, to more strictly outline the subject area of value orientations, distinguishing their place and role in the structure of consciousness from other regulators of activity. Such an analysis, from our point of view, will allow us to consider concepts used side by side, as fixing meaningfully and functionally different structural elements of a single, complex system of motivational and value regulation of human activity.
Secondly, to develop a toolkit that would make it possible to reveal the psychological content and structure of value orientations of both an individual and a group subject of activity.
The contextual heterogeneity of the content of the concept “value” is natural for everyday word usage and everyday worldview, but it prevents the further development of theoretical concepts, conserving the concept in the context of its use and conceptually isolating various scientific approaches. The path to developing a unified theoretical context, a problem field that would make it possible to productively use the achievements of various isolated areas, lies through a systematic analysis of the approaches available in science.
Such an analysis is beyond the scope of this work. Value orientations interest us as a category used to study the motivation of activity. A brief historical overview was necessary as some background for defining the subject area of value orientations. How do the value and motivational components of consciousness correlate? Don't they describe the same reality? These are the questions to be answered.
Analysis of works in which a distinction is made between the value and motivational components of consciousness allows us to distinguish two main approaches.
The first one can be called “structural-functional”. Its authors consider motives and value orientations as the lowest and highest levels in the structure of consciousness. Moreover, each of these levels plays a significant role in the regulation of individual behavior.
The second approach is based on the “essential feature”. Considering motives and CO, first of all, as the results of a mental reflection of the subject-practical activity of the subject, supporters of this approach identify different essential foundations of the value and motivational components of consciousness.
An active proponent of the first approach is the American sociologist T. Parsons. According to him, the meaning of “motivational orientations” is that they directly connect the situation with the actor. The mechanism of action of the CO is mediated by the entire socio-cultural experience of the individual. “The central centers are focused on compliance with norms, standards, and selection criteria. These are, as it were, second-order orientations.” A similar idea of CO as the highest level of regulation of behavior is expressed by philosopher and sociologist A.G. Zdravomyslov.
Revealing the features of the second approach, we can give an example of the position of sociologist and philosopher I.M. Popova: she distinguishes between values and central goals. Values are generalized ideas that act as generalized ideals, stereotypes of social and individual consciousness, functioning as ideal criteria for assessing and orientation of the individual and society. When it comes to empirical research, COs act as a kind of substitute. The basis for motivating behavior is the immediate needs of the individual. Motivational components of consciousness, in contrast to value components, are more based on the genuine needs of a person and are characterized by greater individuality, pragmatism and effectiveness.
The relationship between the cognitive elements of consciousness (knowledge, ideas, norms) and the value elements (social values, value orientations of the individual) is not unambiguous. Let us refer to the reasoning of Lyubimova T.B. “What the value and cognitive elements of culture have in common is that both are standards. The content of a cognitive standard or knowledge is any relationship between objects or in an object. The subject is, as it were, placed outside the brackets of the cognitive standard: The value standard changes the direction of attention of the person performing it; it is no longer directed to the relations in the object in itself, but to the relation of the object to the subject. Value is what something happens or is done for. Relations in an object and between objects are present here only to the extent that they can be essential for action. They are considered in their ability to be included in the chain of ends and means."
Thus, the problem of the structure and functions of a person’s value orientations in the philosophical, sociological and psychological aspects is being actively developed in modern domestic and foreign science, and the prospects for their constructive development are associated with solving a number of philosophical, methodological and practical problems of the determination of human behavior.
Practical task
Compare definitions of personality orientation, find commonality and differences in these definitions
Give an answer to the question: does the orientation of a person influence a person’s destiny? Formulate the main goals of your life
You can answer yes, because... Our future depends on it. It is direction that determines our interests in life.
“You should set yourself two goals in life.
The first goal is to achieve what you have been striving for.
The second goal is the ability to rejoice in what has been achieved.
Only the wisest representatives of humanity
capable of achieving the second goal."
Smith Logan Pearsall
The most important goal in my life is to get a higher education, because... it is this that can give me stability in the future. the second goal is to have a well-paid job, but without achieving the first goal, this can hardly be achieved.
Personality orientation, its role in human life
In the human psyche there is also a set of stable essential properties that manifests itself in all types of activity.
Character is the general ways of interaction of an individual with the environment acquired in specific social conditions, constituting the type of his life activity.
The unique character of each person is determined by his orientation (stable motivational sphere of the individual) and the characteristics of the activity - volitional qualities.
Human activity and behavior are guided by a stable system of relationships. If in animals the motivation of behavior constantly changes depending on the state of the body and external conditions, then human activity is directed by a stable system of relationships. Therefore, character traits are determined and classified, first of all, depending on the orientation of the individual, on the system of stable relationships of a person to various phenomena of reality.
This sphere of personality combines the dominant needs, feelings, attitudes, drives, interests, desires, ideals, beliefs and worldview of a given individual. The system of relationships of a person is its main quality. The foundation on which a person’s system of relationships is built is needs.
The entire system of personality relationships, its orientation is a motivational-regulatory substructure of the personality, determining the general features of its behavior.
The system of stable personality relationships is divided into the following groups:
A person’s attitude to society, the microenvironment, and individuals.
A person's attitude towards himself is his self-awareness.
Self-awareness has its own structure - a system of self-relations, which is determined by the individual’s ability to self-knowledge.
Attitude to work and other activities.
Treating things as products of human labor.
Along with the above division of personality relationships, the properties of these relationships differ in content, which also manifest themselves in the form of individual personality traits.
The following properties of personality relationships are distinguished.
The social significance of a person’s relationships, the level of their social value, which determines the moral qualities of a person, the morality of his everyday behavior, the correspondence of the personality’s orientation to progressive social ideas.
The diversity of the individual’s needs, the breadth of his interests and awareness of the central core interests that determine the individual’s determination.
The degree of stability of relationships, which determines the consistency and perseverance of an individual in achieving a goal - integrity of character.
A broad system of views, ideas and concepts about the surrounding reality, knowledge of its basic interrelations represents the highest motivational and guiding basis for a person’s behavior - his worldview. The features of worldview as the most important characterological property of a person are the degree of its awareness, integrity and scientific character. A developed worldview is an indicator of personality maturity.
Associated with the worldview is the formation of a belief system - a stable motivational formation in which knowledge is synthesized with feelings, with deep faith in them. Beliefs are knowledge that has become the principle of activity.
A person’s relationships are formed on the basis of his knowledge, ideas, and life experience. Thus, the experience of an individual, the system of his knowledge, are the most important substructure of character.
Another substructure of character is a variety of generalized skills of behavior and activity.
Character traits and types. Character is an individual-typological combination of value orientations and regulatory characteristics of the individual.
There are different character traits and character types. Character traits are expressed in certain general characteristics of behavior, and character type is expressed in general ways of interacting with the environment. Diverse character traits are combined into the following groups.
Volitional character traits are stable individual-typological features of conscious, conceptually mediated regulation of activity and behavior. These include: focus, independence, determination, perseverance, etc.
Emotional character traits are stable individual-typological features of direct, spontaneous regulation of behavior.
Intellectual character traits are stable individual-typological characteristics of mental abilities.
The character of each person is a rich palette of colors, tones and halftones, a unique, unique identity.
But the main thing in a person is his central life aspirations and the ability to realize them.
So, character consists of two groups of properties - motivational and performance. Stable motivational properties, that is, the orientation of the individual, are an indicator of the level of personal development. This area of personality is most associated with intellect, emotions and feelings.
The performing sphere of the personality—the features of its conscious self-regulation—are determined by the volitional qualities of the individual. But various volitional qualities of a person can be developed to different degrees. Thus, great strength of character can be combined with some instability, strength of character with insufficient determination, etc. It depends on the circumstances of life, on the demands that were predominantly placed on a person on his life’s path.
Along with individual character traits, one can distinguish a general way of adapting a person to reality - a person’s character type. When determining the type of character, what is essentially common in the characters of individual groups of people is highlighted, which determines the style of their life, the method of adaptation to the environment.
Character types:
A harmoniously integral type, well adaptable in various situations. This type of character is distinguished by the stability of relationships and at the same time high adaptability to the environment. A person with this type of character has no internal conflicts; his desires coincide with what he does. He is a sociable, strong-willed, principled person.
Internally conflicting type, but externally consistent with the environment. This type of character is characterized by inconsistency between internal motivations and external behavior, which, in accordance with the requirements of the environment, is carried out with great tension.
Conflict type with reduced adaptation. This type of character is characterized by conflict between emotional impulses and social responsibilities, impulsiveness, a predominance of negative emotions, and underdeveloped communicative properties.
Variable type, adapting to any conditions as a result of instability of positions, unprincipledness. This type of character indicates a low level of personality development, the absence of a stable general way of behavior. Lack of character, constant adaptation to external circumstances is a surrogate for plasticity of behavior; it should not be confused with genuine plasticity of behavior, with the ability to take into account circumstances. To achieve one’s main goals, without deviating from socially positive norms and requirements. So, character is a general regulatory feature of the individual, which is formed in appropriate living conditions. The basis of character education is a system of influences on the orientation of the individual and the corresponding organization of the ways of human life.
Conclusion
Thus, the analysis of psychological research on the problem of the formation of value orientations allows us to draw a number of conclusions:
there is no single, generally accepted approach to defining the concepts of “value” and “value orientations” in psychological science as a whole or in any of its branches;
some researchers focus on the genetic aspect of these concepts, others on the functional, and others on the structural;
both in foreign and domestic psychology, the problem of such value orientations, as an element of the dispositional system, remains on the periphery due to the emphasis on the study of social attitudes;
Almost all researchers note the complexity and complexity of the formation of such value orientations as a psychological phenomenon.
most researchers of the psychological aspects of the formation of value orientations associate their formation with the influence on membership groups of large social groups formed by primary groups;
The socio-psychological mechanisms of the formation of value orientations have not been sufficiently studied.
Due to the fact that the formation of a person’s value orientations depends on the interaction of the main team with the membership group, the question of the socio-psychological connection between the small group and the main team seems important.
The question of the influence of the inclusion of a small membership group in a broader social environment on the nature of the formation of value orientations of its members is part of a broader question of the interaction of the individual and the social environment. The process of socialization of an individual mainly comes down to inclusion in one or another small group and through it into a certain social institution, which is a “translator” of social experience and in which the individual is introduced to a system of norms and values. Such a social institution in early adolescence is mainly the school, as well as health and sports camps, training centers, etc. From the point of view of social psychology, the question of how the inclusion of an individual in various social communities affects the process of socialization is especially interesting here.
The importance of this issue is due to the fact that a person’s involvement in various social communities, the formation of his direct or indirect (through a group) involvement in certain social communities turns out to be in many ways an important condition for influencing the individual.
personality orientation need motivation interest
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In metric certificates they write,
where the person was born, when he was born,
and they just don’t write why he was born
M. Safir
Direction occupies the most important place in the structure of personality.
ORIENTATION OF PERSONALITY- a system of needs, motives, interests, beliefs, ideals, value orientations of a person, giving his life meaningfulness and selectivity.
Orientation acts as the highest level of personality, which is most socially conditioned and most fully reflects the ideology of the community in which a person is included.
NEED- the need experienced by a person for something that lies outside of him, it reveals a person’s connection with the world around him and his dependence on it.
In addition to the items necessary for existence, there are those whose presence is not necessary, but are of interest to humans. Ideals rise above needs and interests.
Motives are directly related to needs.
MOTIVE - motivations for activity related to meeting the needs of the subject.
Sometimes motive is briefly defined as a perceived need. Those. as needs are recognized and objectified, they become motives.
Direction includes two closely related points:
a) substantive content, since focus is always a focus on something (interests, goals, values);
b) the mental stress that arises (energy generated by unsatisfied needs).
Real behavior is rarely caused by one motive alone (a person goes to work because of money, and because of self-affirmation, and because he likes the work, and for many other reasons). Such a complex conditioning of behavior in psychology is called multimotivation.
There are three main types of personality orientation: personal, collectivistic and business.
Personal orientation - is created by the predominance of motives for one’s own well-being, the desire for personal primacy, prestige. Such a person is most often busy with himself, with his feelings and experiences and reacts little to the needs of the people around him: he ignores the interests of employees or the work he must do. He sees work, first of all, as an opportunity to satisfy his own aspirations, regardless of the interests of other employees.
Focus on mutual actions- occurs when a person’s actions are determined by the need for communication, the desire to maintain good relationships with colleagues at work and study. Such a person shows interest in joint activities, although he may not contribute to the successful completion of the task; often his actions even make it difficult to complete the group task and his actual assistance may be minimal.
Business orientation - reflects the predominance of motives generated by the activity itself, passion for the process of activity, a selfless desire for knowledge, mastering new skills and abilities. Typically, such a person seeks cooperation and achieves the greatest productivity of the group, and therefore tries to prove a point of view that he considers useful for completing the task.
It has been established that persons with a predominant focus on themselves have the following character traits:
More busy with themselves and their feelings, problems;
They make unfounded and hasty conclusions and assumptions about other people, and also behave in discussions;
They try to impose their will on the group; those around them do not feel free in their presence.
People with a predominant focus on mutual action:
Avoid directly solving the problem;
Giving in to group pressure;
Do not express original ideas and it is not easy to understand what such a person wants to express;
They do not take leadership when it comes to choosing tasks.
People with a predominant business orientation:
Help individual group members express their thoughts;
Support the group to achieve its goals;
Express their thoughts and considerations easily and clearly;
Take control when it comes to choosing a task;
They do not shy away from directly solving the problem.
The third level of the system is the general (dominant) orientation of the interests of the individual. It is formed on the basis of higher social needs
and represents a predisposition to identify with a particular area of social activity. In some people we find a dominant orientation of interests in the sphere of professional activity, in others - in family, in others - in leisure (hobbies), etc.
The highest level of the dispositional system is formed by a system of value orientations towards the goals of life and the means of achieving them. It is formed on the basis of the highest social needs of the individual (the need for inclusion in the social environment) and in accordance with the lifestyle in which the social and individual values of the individual can be realized. It is this level that plays a decisive role in the self-regulation of behavior.
All elements and levels of the dispositional system are not isolated from each other. On the contrary, they closely interact with each other, and the mechanism of interconnection itself, according to V. A. Yadov, should be considered as “a mechanism of motivation that ensures the expedient management of an individual’s behavior and its self-regulation.”
The most important function of the dispositional system is to regulate the social behavior of the individual. Behavior itself is a complex structure, within which several hierarchically located levels can be distinguished.
The first level is behavioral acts, reactions of the subject to the current objective situation. Their feasibility is determined by the need to establish adaptive relationships between the environment and the individual.
The next level of behavior is a habitual action or deed, formed from a number of behavioral acts. An act is an elementary socially significant unit of behavior, the purpose of which is to establish a correspondence between the social situation and the social need.
A purposeful sequence of actions forms behavior in a particular area of activity that seems most significant to a person. For example, pronounced professional behavior that realizes itself in the style of professional activity.
Finally, the integrity of behavior in various spheres of human life is actually the manifestation of activity in its entirety. Goal setting at this level represents a kind of “life plan.”
Concluding his characterization of his concept of personality, V. A. Yadov emphasizes that “dispositional regulation of social behavior is at the same time dispositional motivation, i.e., a mechanism that ensures the expediency of the formation of various states of readiness for behavior. At the same time, the regulation of social behavior must be interpreted in the context of the entire dispositional system of the individual.”
The life path of an individual as a space for personal development.
One of the main principles of psychology is traditionally the principle of development, which identifies variability as the main characteristic of personality. Talking about the variability of personality and its constant development is becoming increasingly relevant in connection with the increasing variability of the modern world. Technological and social changes that took decades in past centuries can now happen in a matter of months or even weeks. The acceleration and complexity of all aspects of human life sharply exacerbates the contradictions between the individual and the conditions of his existence. In a situation where traditional guidelines for personal development and moral norms are being lost all over the world, in a situation of blurred social priorities, a person himself must decide what to strive for, what is considered important in his life, and what is secondary. These decisions are often determined not so much by the general characteristics of age, but by the experience of experiencing eventful, key moments in a person’s individual history. That is why it is necessary to identify the properties of the life path in connection with the problem of personality and its development.
Personal life path
Study personality development in the context of a person’s individual history, or life path, in Soviet psychology was one of the first to suggest S.L. Rubinstein .
It was he who first spoke about a person as a subject of life's path - a person capable of consciously, actively and independently determining his destiny. Moreover, the development of consciousness, according to Rubinstein, is mediated by practical reality. He writes that “through the appropriate organization of individual practice, society shapes both the content and the form of individual human consciousness.” But there is also an inverse dependence of activity on the properties of the subject, for example, on hereditary prerequisites and, of course, on the needs, abilities and character traits that have developed in the history of the individual.
This position led Rubinstein to his famous formula: “external through internal.” Then, in order to understand what specific characteristics of activity can be expected from a specific subject in a specific situation, it is important to study the purely individual life history that this subject has. In this way, we will not only study the characteristics of an individual’s activity, but also understand his essential personality characteristics. The scientist emphasizes that human personality “finds its final expression in the fact that it not only develops like any organism, but also has its own history.”
In a report at the All-Union Conference on Pedagogical Sciences (April, 1941) S.L. Rubinstein develops the idea that “the effect that a teacher observes following any pedagogical event... is never the result of an isolated pedagogical influence; it is always a product of the child’s entire development, conditioned to some extent by his entire life path” . With this example, Rubinstein shows how the principle of “external through internal” is embodied in pedagogical practice. In this sense, events ("random" or planned by someone) become significant precisely depending on the "internal" conditions of the individual, including the history of the entire personal development, on the meaning that this event has personally for a particular person.
According to Rubinstein, “due to the fact that external causes act only through internal conditions, the external conditionality of personality development is naturally combined with its “spontaneity.” Everything in the psychology of the developing personality is in one way or another externally conditioned, but nothing in its development can be derived directly from external influences." It is in this regard that Rubinstein does not agree with L. S. Vygotsky’s theory of internalization, objecting to “the transformation of a person into a teacher’s creature.” However, this criticism seems to us not entirely appropriate, since the idea of interiorization in Vygotsky’s theory is closely related to two others: the social situation of development and the zones of actual and proximal development. After all, it was precisely these theoretical provisions of L.S. Vygotsky emphasizes that the impact on a person of external conditions is always mediated by his internal attitude towards them.
Thus, the theoretical positions of S.L. Rubinstein's works reveal their enormous fruitfulness due to emphasizing the “internal” factors of development, due to the conditioning of these factors by individual history, which also has its own “events” - key moments in an individual’s life, and also due to the understanding of the individual as the subject of his life path.
S. L. Rubinstein’s concept of personality as a subject of life’s journey was further developed in Soviet psychology B. G. Ananyev. In particular, his ideas about the transformation of the individual into the subject of his own development through the formation of a life plan in the human mind deserve attention. This life plan represents a certain system of personal dispositions, which is the logical conclusion of personality development in puberty/transitional age, and includes a set of value orientations that characterize a complex system of relationships of a young man to himself, to the natural and social world, to his future. The content of adolescence is precisely the process of forming one’s own individual life plan, which often has an intimate and personal meaning for the young man.
Independence and subjectivity in personal development naturally depend, paradoxically as it may be formulated, on the social situation in which a person finds himself. Dialectics of the relationship between personality and environment B.G. Ananyev shows through the existing connection between the interindividual structure to which the personality belongs and the introindividual structure of the personality itself: “The variety of connections of the individual with society as a whole, with various social groups and institutions determines the introindividual structure of the personality, the organization of personal properties and its inner world. In turn, complexes of personal properties that have formed and become stable formations regulate the volume and degree of activity of an individual’s social contacts, influence the formation of one’s own development environment. Restriction, or even more so, the severance of an individual’s social connections, disrupts the normal course of human life and can be one of the causes of neuroses.” Thus, the personality structure, according to Ananyev, is the result of social development, “the effect of a person’s entire life path.”
Followers of the ideas about the importance of studying the life path of an individual for a more complete and adequate understanding of the logic of its development are also L.I. Antsyferova, K.A. Abulkhanova-Slavskaya, N.A. Loginova and others.
So, L.I. Antsyferova, discussing the methodological problems of developmental psychology, points out that the development of personality is the main way of its being, that, consequently, the personality “constantly extrapolates itself into its future, and projects its distant future onto its present.” She also notes that the process of personality development is accompanied (among other changes) by the expansion of “a person’s value-semantic relations to the world, realized in his creative activity, communication, aesthetic experience...”.
These value-semantic relationships are dynamic in nature. And even being in a latent form, when for a sufficiently long period of time they are not exposed to changed life circumstances, they “function, so to speak, at a subdominant level. They are characterized by functional development with their own microphases and microstages, turning at a certain stage into structural development." Note that this description partly reveals the mechanism of the personogenic situation of development. Indeed, before the occurrence of a personal event, many personal formations function and mature at the “subdominant” level, that is, in a hidden form. The changed situation dramatically changes the “alignment of personal forces” and previously unclaimed personality traits, which were, so to speak, in the shadows, come to the fore.
In the works K. A. Abulkhanova-Slavskaya It is noted that the integral structures of personality (character, talent, orientation, life experience) are formed and manifested in human life. The need to introduce the concept of “life activity” is justified due to the fact that “to reveal the specifics of personality development, in contrast to simple change, an analysis of its “movement” in life activity is required. The latter is the “space” and the scale of personality analysis in which it is actually captured development; life activity is also the “time” in which personality changes take place, division into “present”, “past” and “future” occurs. This time line of life activity is characterized by a continuous reverse influence of the results of the previous stage on the subsequent one. the impact of life’s achievements on a person, as K.A. Abulkhanova-Slavskaya formulates, “multiplying life’s achievements by its own increasing capabilities” are already secondary conditions for its development (Psychologists’ joke: it is not only what is in the head that is important, but also that. , where the head is located).
A kind of quintessence of “Soviet” theories of personality development in the context of the life path is the work ON THE. Loginova"Personality development and its life path." And as a result of the discussion of this group of theories, we propose the logic of personality development, which the author presented in the above article.
Briefly it looks like this:
Life path - the story of individual development; this development is possible only in society;
Society determines the essential moments of a person’s life path and is the macro-environment of human development;
The characteristic of a society is its way of life; through lifestyle there are direct connections between the individual and the macroenvironment;
The way of life develops as a result of the actions of the individual; its individualization goes along with the creation by the individual of his own development environment;
Personal development is determined by lifestyle not directly, but indirectly - through the individual’s psychological lifestyle;
The subjective side of changes in the environment, that is, changes in their significance for the development of the individual, is captured in the concept of “social situation of development” (according to L.S. Vygotsky);
An individual lifestyle is stable, but there are turning points in a person’s biography that cause significant changes in lifestyle; these moments are biographical events;
An event is the basic unit of a person’s biography, an event is a moment in life, although it may have a preparatory phase and long-term consequences; the event is discrete, limited in time compared to the evolving circumstances of life;
The immediate psychological consequences of events arise in the form of mental states that reflect the subjective content of events and correspond to the character of a person;
There is a close connection between states and character: mental states accumulate and become characteristic; this is the long-term effect of a life event;
A person develops in the direction of increasing the subjectivity of life; it is a product of biography, because biographical events have objective consequences and may not depend on the person in their origin, but at the same time, as the personality develops, its role in one’s own destiny increases; It has been proven that during the course of life, the “specific weight” of biographical events associated with the individual’s own activity increases.
This sequence of reasoning, while recognizing the dynamic nature of the life path, nevertheless ignores the same dynamic, often instantaneous, changes in the personality itself. In our opinion, this does not happen by chance: the fact is that the absence of a concept that adequately reflects a certain phenomenon leads to ignoring the phenomenon itself. In this case, in order to designate the node of phenomena in personal development that reflect the scale, instantaneity, uniqueness, integrity and sociocultural nature of changes caused by the sensitivity of the individual to them and the event of the life path, it is advisable to use the concept of “personal development situation”. After all, what is not named simply does not exist. To paraphrase the famous statement of L. Wittgenstein (“the boundaries of my language determine the boundaries of my world”), we can state: the boundaries of psychological terminology determine the boundaries of psychological reality.
Among Western concepts First of all, humanistic psychology attracts attention, but in that part of it that studied the problems of personality development in the context of its life path.
The most prominent figure in this direction is Charlotte Buehler. Her first works were devoted to the study of the inner world of the personality of adolescents and young men based on their diaries. Later, she declared the life of an individual to be an individual story, the dynamics of which constitute the life path. One of the main works of S. Bühler is the monograph “The Life Path of a Person as a Psychological Problem,” written in 1933.
To determine the main factors influencing personality development, she identified a number of aspects or aspects of life. The first line is a sequence of “external” events, this is a line of changes in the objective circumstances of a person’s life; the second line describes the dynamics of experiences, values, changes in which represent “internal” events; Buhler’s third line of analysis is the results of human activity, the level of objectification of consciousness. The study of numerous biographies of a wide variety of people allowed Bühler to put forward the idea of the multiphase nature of a person’s life path, of which, in accordance with her concept, there were five. The first phase covers the age from 16 to 20 years and is characterized by the presence in the inner world of the young man of plans and hopes, which are sketches of possible paths in later life.
The very process of choosing life goals and paths is often, according to Buhler, accompanied by confusion, uncertainty and at the same time a thirst for great things. In the second phase (from 16-20 to 25-30 years), a person tries himself in different types of work, makes acquaintances in search of a life partner. The third phase begins after 30 years, when a person finds his calling or just a permanent occupation. In the fourth phase, an aging person experiences a difficult age of biological decline, leaving work, and shortening the future life span. The path to self-realization ends, self-determination ceases to function. In the fifth phase (after 65-70 years), old people live in the past, eke out an aimless existence, therefore Bühler does not classify the last stage of life as the actual path of life.
In the literature, Bühler's position is criticized, which defines a clear division of events into external and internal, since her lines of external and internal events run parallel, never intersecting, and it is not possible to detect their connection. This explains the need and possibility of more specific research, which consists in establishing this connection, namely, the conditionality of changes in internal authorities (which act as “internal” events) by “external” events (the establishment or destruction of friendships, the death of a loved one, conflicts with parents, with teachers, with loved ones, etc.)
Also, within the framework of humanistic psychology, the German psychologist developed his concept of personality development Hans Thome. He called this concept a “biographically based cognitive theory of personality.” As a psychologist of a humanistic orientation, H. Thome notes that the uniqueness of personality “can be understood not within the framework of genetic programming, but based on the fact of active “dialogue”, interaction of a child, teenager or adult with the social world around him.” Thome also discusses the problem of personality constancy and variability, important for developmental psychology, and states that changes in personality structure largely depend “on those environmental factors that are the framework for the individual’s active interaction with his situation.”
Very fruitful for describing ways of living life events is the theory of “thematic structuring” by Thome, which “sees a close connection between the dominant motives and value orientations in a certain situation, on the one hand, and internal and external actions, on the other.” That is, the peculiarities of perception of real situations are largely determined by the dominant “themes” of a person. Thome considers the concept of “theme” as synonymous with the concepts of “value” and “significance”.
The next link in his theory is the idea of “techniques” of being. Even Theophrastus, in his “Characters,” to whom Thome refers, was the first to identify different types of people according to the criterion of their dominant technologies of existence. By the way, both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche continued this same method of analyzing people in their works. Techniques of “being” are forms of a person’s reactions to life circumstances, his actions, which can change both his life situation, himself, and even the direction of his own thoughts. At the same time, Thome emphasized that the meaning of each technique lies in the topic it serves. A specific combination of “techniques” and “themes” form certain development styles.
Thus, based on longitudinal studies, Tome identified the following developmental styles for the period of adolescence (14-18 years)::
a) increasing problematization, that is, constant searches and questions about the meaning of traditions and so on;
b) increasing adaptation to the norms existing in society;
c) alternation of high problematization and good adaptation in different periods of development;
d) increasing dependence on artificial stimulation (for example, drug addiction, alcoholism).
Thus, H. Thome’s research postulates the main parameters of personality development, which are socio-historically conditioned. The most significant are such development parameters as “themes” (“significance”, value orientations) and “techniques” of existence (ways of reacting in response to changing life circumstances). Here the connection between the events of people’s life paths and the current system of their personal dispositions is quite obvious.
Among foreign theories that state the importance of the influence of past events in a person’s life on his current mental life, perhaps the most famous is psychoanalysis. However, in understanding the past events of a person’s life as the only factors of his development, it is to nullify the activity of the individual himself. However, this did not prevent some scientists working in line with psychoanalysis from formulating provisions that were valuable for the psychology of the life course. Such scientists primarily include Eric Ericson. His theory describes the development of personality and the periodization of life from birth to old age (see more about this in paragraph 2.2). The central theme in this theory of personality development is the study of identity, which Erikson considered as a psychological task of each age. For example, a young man who has acquired the ability to generalize is faced with the task of combining everything he knows about himself as a schoolboy, son, athlete, friend, boy scout, newspaperman, and so on. He must collect all these roles into a single whole, comprehend it, connect it with the past and project it into the future. (Remember the idea of a multi-role personality structure outlined in paragraph 4.1.)
Also, according to Erikson’s views, personal development is the constant overcoming of a crisis that is specific to a given age. At the same time, a crisis is not a catastrophe, but a critical point of increased vulnerability and at the same time expanding opportunities. The more crises along the path of life are successfully overcome, the more successful the development of the individual will be.
Thus, we can conclude that the process of personality development in the aspect of life path can be studied from different theoretical positions. It should be noted that the concepts of S.L.’s life path are of great importance for understanding the development of personality in the events of her life and in the resulting person-related situations. Rubinstein and other scientists who developed it (B.G. Ananyev, N.A. Loginova, etc.). The views of S. Bühler, who noted that the unit of a person’s life path is an event, and H. Thome, who developed ideas about the “themes” of existence and “techniques” of response to crisis events, are very valuable. The problems of self-determination and personal identity, discussed in the works of E. Erikson, make it possible to reveal the nature of many personal dispositions of a person. A more complete understanding of personality development throughout life can be obtained by studying its significant events.
The concept of “life path” is key for personality psychology if we understand personality as a historical entity. “With the help of this concept, we can understand the nature of the experience of those events that became decisive in his biography,” writes L. A. Pergamenshchik.
Life Path Events
The concept of “event” was transferred to psychology from everyday life and, since it was not subjected to rigorous analysis, still retains an element of an everyday concept.
This term is most often used within event-biographical approach, and situational approach.
A feature of the first theoretical direction is the recognition of the uniqueness of each person’s life path. This uniqueness is determined by the ways in which events are experienced. The event-biographical concept emphasizes the multidirectionality and discontinuity of the life path.
The peculiarity of the situational approach is the study of situational determinants (factors) of behavior. This direction was developed within the framework of interactionist psychology, which declared its main functions to be the description, classification and analysis of stimuli and situations, as well as the study of the interaction of personality and situation in behavior. In fact, the situational approach developed in polemics with “personologists” who defended the primacy of personality traits in predicting behavior. Recently, in the development of the situational approach, as J. Forgas notes, two trends have emerged: firstly, the emphasis, which was previously placed on the physical or environmental environment, is now noticeably shifting to the social or cultural environment; secondly, if previously in most theories situations were considered as objective, measurable entities, now theories have become more cognitively and phenomenologically oriented, one of the main points in them was the emergence of a situation as a perceived phenomenon.
However, a significant drawback of the situational approach continues to be the laboratory nature of the research, which makes it difficult to compare events in a person’s real life and situations selected for research purposes.
The situational approach studies a situation (event) in the form of both a simple (stimulus) factor and an increasingly complex (situation, environment) phenomenon. “The concept of “life situation” appears as the most complex and interesting on this continuum. With its introduction, the subject of research of the situational approach merges with the subject of the psychology of a person’s life path.” And already from the position of this approach, active research work is being carried out both in domestic and foreign psychology.
In Soviet and post-Soviet psychology, these issues are studied within the framework of the direction known as the “life path of the individual” (S.L. Rubinshtein, B.G. Ananyev). To study the life path, the biographical method is used (B.G. Ananyev). Within the framework of this method, the methods “Psychological autobiography”, causometry, etc. have been developed. The main unit of analysis is the event, since it is considered as the simplest element of the life path.
The number of cause-and-target relationships in which life events are included determines the significance of the event. But the last fact is not in dispute, since there are other types of connections between events (and not just causal ones), just as there is a significant event that has little connection with others.
In sources on psychiatry you can also find a description of the results obtained using the biographical method, since clinical history is the most common form of autobiography. But here the emphasis is on the role of various life events in the occurrence and course of the disease.
A significant number of works existing on the problems of the impact of events on personal development are characterized by specificity. Thus, when studying life situations, the greatest attention is paid to stressful life events and ways of coping with them. Concept " coping strategy"(Coping) is understood as a process of constructive adaptation, "as a result of which a given person is able to cope with the demands presented in such a way that difficulties are overcome and a feeling of growth of one's own capabilities arises." The concept of coping is especially in demand recently - a time of fundamental socio-cultural transformations A change in the scale of values, a rapid breakdown of stereotypes, a crisis of self-awareness fit into an extremely significant characteristic for building an image of the world -. instability of the social situation. New realities require not just adaptation to it, but coping with her, that is, creating appropriate patterns of behavior.
The process of overcoming difficulties proceeds as follows: a) a “primary assessment” of the situation occurs - a cognitive process with emotional components; b) evaluate one’s own capabilities, including possible support from others; c) based on failures or new information, one can come to a tertiary assessment of the problem, including a new formulation of the problem and new behavioral alternatives.
We note here that coping with a difficult event may require a restructuring of the personal system or some of its levels. The rigidity of this structure cannot lead to effective adaptation. Therefore, studies examining constructive coping strategies could do emphasis on the relationship between coping and development.
And based on this approach, we can identify three options for the consequences of a person’s collision with a difficult life event:
Consolidation of proven attitudes, beliefs and value orientations, which are stabilized in the face of new demands (in internal dialogue this can be presented as follows: "I was right");
Further development of existing dispositions, personality traits, caused by the insufficiency of the current level of personal structure ( “It turns out that life is richer than I thought about it!”);
Destruction of behavioral programs, especially in the case of completely unusual, completely new or very difficult demands, which can be felt as “loss of self”, “loss of the meaning of life” ("I'm good for nothing") when the results of previous stages of personal development are devalued ( “When I figured out what I could really achieve in this life, I realized what little things I had been doing all this time.”
The destructive impact can be so great that the process of destruction becomes irreversible, leading to pathology and accentuation. K. Leongard, and then A.E. Lichko in his research showed that personality accentuations can develop under the influence of a special kind of mental trauma or difficult situations in life that place increased demands on the most vulnerable place in character.
This is, however, a last resort option. As a rule, having felt the beginning of this process, the person performs intense work, which could be called the process of “finding oneself.” This attitude towards life's trials was recorded by F. Nietzsche: “What does not kill me will make me stronger.”
The main contradiction that a person faces is the contradiction between the motivational sphere and the changed “external” factors, which, given the existing regulatory system (existing personal potential), it cannot resolve. That is, first of all, attitudes, value orientations, and the entire dispositional system that “served” the regulatory mechanism of the individual’s life are at risk. As a result of resolving this contradiction, a person can switch to a qualitatively new way of life: what served as the occasion and reason for the experience is transformed as a result of the overcoming reaction into internal experience, the awareness of which will regulate further principles, create new values and a program of life.
Obviously, in this sense, M.K. Mamardashvili wrote about man that he is “the only creature in the world who is in a state of constant rebirth...”, and M.M. Bakhtin formulates the idea of incompleteness, the incompleteness of man, his discrepancy with himself. By calling a person an “infinite function,” the author emphasizes the constant movement in which a person finds himself, the “fluidity” of the phenomena of his inner world.
The group of coping theories includes numerous studies of psychological stress. From the physiological understanding of stress as a nonspecific (that is, the same, regardless of the stimulus) reaction of the body to any external influence, they are now moving to the recognition of the specificity of the reaction in the sense that it is carried out to a significant stimulus. It is with the help of the concept of “significance” that we can explain the differences in the impact of similar events on different people. That is, a person is involved in experiencing an event through its meaning.
Stress theories assess the relationship between major life changes and the extent to which they affect the body. T. Holmes and R. Rahe compiled a scale-questionnaire of recent experience, which is widely used today. This scale contains a list of 38 life changes (events) in health, work, family, personal life, and financial sphere (see Table 5.1). Events here can be either with an emphasis on objective circumstances (change of place of study, place of residence) or on subjective ones (change in personal habits, making important decisions related to the future). The subjects rated the events in points corresponding to the severity of the stressfulness of the events, using the event “marriage” as a sample, which had a pre-score of 500 points. The scores for each event were then divided by 10 and called “life change units” (LCU). The total score will serve as an indicator of the severity of life stress. Similar “thermometer” scales for determining stress levels have been developed by other researchers.
