Social representations and value orientations in the world view of modern teenagers: a mosaic of contradictions

Abstract

The world view of modern teenagers in the unstable social situation through the updating of social representations and value orientations is discussed. Social representations can serve as cognitive component of the world picture that are born in ordinary everyday thinking in order to help man to comprehend and interpret the surrounding social reality. Values and emotions represent the affective component of the world picture, which manifest themselves in interpersonal relationships. In the modern world one of the most important values is becoming success, and vision of success reflects the place of a teenager among other people, evaluation of their actions, behaviors, and relationships with other people. The results of studying the location and nature of social representations in the world picture of older adolescents in a situation of the transitivity of the modern society are presented. The resulting materials show that the social representations about the environment in the world picture of modern youth are extremely unstructured and inconsistent, have a low degree of connectedness of different aspects of reality between them, that significantly complicates the building of the world picture. Emotional experiences of adolescents and young people are more harmonious. They show not only the most affectively charged images in the film world, but also the contradictions between the attitude in the world and attitude towards the world. The high degree of importance of the values of independence and achievement for all adolescents that indicates a high motivation for autonomy and personal recognition. Professional orientation and spatial characteristics of residence not only reflecte in the content of the picture of the world of teenagers, but also determine the direction of its development. The lack of harmonious relationship between the perception and ideas about the world in general is discovered, that complicates the formation of a personalized picture of the world.