ИСТИНА

In modern psychology we are aware of a variety of different concepts, that explain the possible background to our decisions and judgment: some authors say, that values are managing our behaviour, others accentuate goals, needs, motives, meanings, life scripts, life strategies and etc. as the main guideline to our existence. In our research, we were interested in these questions as well, we were looking for a relation between values (S. Schwartz) and life strategies (E. Fromm), in order to understand the underlying meaning of our choices. One of the factors, that came forward as a social context, was consumer society. It's convincing that consumer society and economical inconsistency are major, modern society is dependent on material goods and this factor affects our values, choices and existence. The sample (n=107) consisted of participants from a variety of fields, with higher education and consistent income. We used several questionnaires: Schwartz Value Survey by S. Schwartz in approbation by O.A. Tikhomandritskaya to investigate portrait of significant values, System of life meanings questionnaire by V.Y. Kotlyakov to investigate life strategies, Tendency for conspicuous consumption questionnaire by O.S. Posypanova to measure consumer behavior, as well as, we used qualitative analysis with Must-test by P.N. Ivanov, E.F. Kolobova to gather data about life values and Thematic Apperceptive Test to get a deeper understanding of all of the mentioned concepts. Through quantitative analysis and following qualitative analysis, we discovered profiles with relations between life strategies and values: participants with "Being and Having" life strategy show significance in self-regulation, achievement and safety values; participants with "Being" life strategy show significance in achievement, safety and goodwill values; values like hedonism and power are significant for "Having" life strategy; "Not Being and Not Having" life strategy shows an increasing level of conforming and tradition values. Conspicuous consumption (63%) as the consumer society commitment indicator is significant in "Having" life strategy. Gathered results showcase significant relation and interconnectedness between the concepts. Qualitative analysis defined the underlying differences in comprehension of values and life strategies. Nevertheless, we are convinced that the internal nature of mentioned values is different and it gives us even greater awareness of present interconnectedness. Presumably, there are deeper underlying processes and mechanisms (cognition, metacognition) that are responsible for our choices, values and life strategies and our further research is dedicated to investigate that.