The Concept of the Socio-Psychological Situation and the Problem of Safety

The concept of the socio-psychological situation. Classification of situations: routine, problematic, socially tense, extreme. Human behavior in routine-problematic and socio-psychological situations. Conflict as a special form of interaction in a routine-problematic situation. Adaptation as a universal mechanism of human behavior in a socio-psychological situation.

The last decade of the twentieth century, and the processes that took place in the country in connection with perestroika and the closure of many enterprises, halted research in this area and defined new problems of maintaining safety, related to economic instability, rising crime, and terrorism, shifting the emphasis from production issues to social ones. The new wave of the global economic crisis of 2008—09 aggravated issues related to the social safety of the individual. In this connection, attention should be paid to a more detailed examination of various socio-psychological situations and the particulars of the interaction between the person and the environment.

There is an inseparable connection between a person and the conditions of his life. This means that the behavior of the individual is determined by his psychological makeup, the situation, and their interaction. A situation is a system of conditions external to the subject that prompt and mediate his social activity . To describe a socio-psychological situation means to identify and formulate the demands that are placed on the individual from outside or worked out by him and that serve as his starting point.

A socio-psychological situation is the result of the active interaction between the individual and the environment.

With this understanding, a situation has objective and subjective sides, depending on which of its elements predominates: external circumstances or the personality. The objective side of the situation includes the actors, the activity they carry out, and its social, temporal, and spatial aspects. The subjective side of the situation consists of interpersonal relations, the socio-psychological climate, group norms, values, and stereotypes of consciousness. The environment is objective, characterized by relative stability over a long period of time, that is, by stability. The situation is subjective and short-lived, considered in relation to the person's own involvement. Two aspects of the representation of the situation in the individual's consciousness are distinguished: the formation and development of the perception of the situation; and the functioning of this perception as an element of the integral system representing the picture of the world. Human behavior is determined not so much by the external environment as by his interpretation of that environment.

The diversity of situations and the methods for studying them have led to the conclusion that a single solution for classifying situations is impossible. There can be as many ways of classifying situations as there are grounds proposed for them. In social psychology there are many classifications of socio-psychological situations. The most general classification is based on the principle of the strength of the destabilizing impact on the individual and society:

• • routine situations — characterized by a traditional, familiar combination of circumstances and conditions that is controllable by the individual; solutions for them are provided by applying known algorithms;
• • problematic situations — characterized by a contradictory combination of circumstances and conditions under which the individual's activity unfolds; the solution has no known algorithm;
• • socially tense situations — characterized by an acute opposition between the personal and intergroup interests of various social groups;
• • extreme situations — presuppose unusual conditions of human existence for which the person's psychophysiological organization or nature is not prepared .

Until recently, it was not customary to speak of social tension; the term was not even part of the active vocabulary. It seemed that everything was limited to conflicts, and even those at the level of communal apartments and small groups. More was written about social well-being, complete mutual understanding, and the striving for a conflict-free society. This does not mean that there was no destabilizing impact on the person and society as a whole — it simply was not discussed. Now the problem of examining various socio-psychological situations has become highly relevant. Throughout the world there is a constant search for forms and ways of relieving tension between groups and factions, states and parties, society and governments. The struggle proceeds with varying success, and there is a suspicion that tension and its release cannot exist without each other. The problem of conflict between the group of managers and the body of people they manage has become especially acute. In the management systems of production teams, dozens and hundreds of different techniques and tricks are developed and applied in order to, if not eliminate the conflict entirely, then at least mitigate it as far as possible. It therefore seems important to examine the behavior of the individual in various socio-psychological situations.