SOCIOCOGNITIVE TRANSITIVITY OF SOCIAL UNDESTANDING OF LIFE REALITY (ETHNIC RUSSIAN YOUTH MEGAPOLICE)

The empirical study of sociocognitive transitivity (the distinction of conservative, transitive and innovative social orientations of the urban and quasi urban youth was made in the framework of a social constructionism approach (the worldview, the inner structure of the reality), and historical and cultural mediation (group stereotypes of reality interpretation). The authors have presented the questionnaire that shows conservative social views and the results of a study that has been conducted on 300 ethnic Russian young people living in Samara and related to different generations (citizens and quasi citizens). This study is based both on the experience of researchers who have developed questionnaires for studying social representations of various phenomena of social reality, and on the method of grounded theory. Conservatism in this research is regarded as a phenomenon of personal and social ideological stagnation, alienation, and immobility, which are formed through the use of outdated sociocognitive stereotypes in processes of self-identification, and expressed in anachronistic and immobile ideas in the processes of social comparison that lead to impairment of the needs for development of an individual and social community. Innovative social interpretation arises (and is described in the article based on the results of the study) as an integrated understanding of the social reality in which the subjective reality is symmetric to the objective reality and not to a particular normative model. It has been proved that quasi urban young people transform urban mentality (civilizational) into the traditionalistic one. The study has revealed that social understanding of the regional youth actualizes the phenomenon of conservatism as a factor of unconscious resistance to changes, although the processes of phenomenon stratification and its attenuation also develop. In general the antagonism of social cognition of modernist and traditionalistic origin has not been revealed. It has been found that urban youth is mostly characterized by attenuated levels of conservatism of social understanding as opposed to that of the quasi urban people.