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15PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCES
FEATURES OF THE LEGAL CULTURE OF YOUNG RUSSIANS
Akimova M.,
Russian State University for the Humanities, Professor, Doctor of Psychology
Persiyantseva S.
Russian State University for the Humanities; Associate Professor;
Psychological Institute of Russian Academy of Education
Abstract
The purpose of the study was to analyze the characteristics of the legal consciousness of youth and its connection with the attitudes of individuals towards justice in assessing laws and court decisions. The study showed that the phenomenon of justice in everyday consciousness is an important criterion for assessing the legal consciousness of Russian youth, who are inclined to view legislation and the judicial system through the prism of fairness. Defects of legal awareness are directly related to the tendency to use justice to evaluate court decisions.
Keywords: legal culture, fairness of laws, types of deformation of legal consciousness.
In any state, various socio-national groups coexist, often differing from each other in their interests, values, and life goals. In order to regulate their relationship and preserve civil peace, the state creates legislation and a judicial system. But the laws themselves, no matter how much they contribute to the establishment of optimal interactions of citizens and the performance of protective functions in relation to them, do not lead to their automatic implementation. They must be accepted by members of society, for which it is necessary to develop a positive attitude towards them, an understanding of their benefits, and their compliance with legal norms.
Law aw is a product of society, it is a system of generally binding, formally defined rules of behavior, "a set of patterns of behavior" [11] that regulate social relations. According to the outstanding philosopher and jurist I.A. Ilyin [6], the embodiment of law in state life is based on legal consciousness, which, in turn, represents "the readiness of the people to put moral principles of spiritual and moral life in the basis of community life" [6, p. 6].
Thus, legal consciousness is inextricably linked with the moral and ethical principles of people. Moreover, morality ("spirituality" according to Ilyin) is the foundation of the rule of law. The legal and moral consciousness of a person includes a set of norms, rules, principles imposed by society on a person and expressed in his behavior. Both types of consciousness should be based, according to Ilyin, a direct conviction of the need and ability to distinguish between "correct" and "acceptable" behavior from "incorrect" and "unacceptable". On the basis of this criterion, there is a regulation of people's lives, their adaptation to the social environment.
Morality, as the embodiment of group interests and requirements, elevates them to the rank of mandatory, normative for representatives of a particular society. Each person, a member of a certain society, is attached to moral standards and values under the influence of the main "agents" of socialization. Key roles in the implementation of socialization are played by the education system, the media, and individual structures of society (family, social circle, professional, educational and other social groups). Socialization, understood by the American sociologist F. Giddings as "the
process of the development of the social nature of man", forms the attitudes, values and standards of a particular society in individuals, contributing to the development of legal awareness and their introduction to culture.
But is socialization capable, in principle, of ennobling human nature, instilling in him the moral foundations that underlie legal consciousness and allow him to maintain the foundations of a normal social life? There is a point of view that as long as a person retains individual needs and interests, until then he will also have motives to violate social norms, whatever these norms may be. The dissemination of knowledge about laws and moral norms is not enough to educate morality and legal culture, understood as the embodiment of this knowledge into behavior. This knowledge only lays the fundamental foundations of legal consciousness, introducing a person to the basic norms and rules of behavior in society. According to the researchers, it is necessary for citizens to voluntarily accept socially significant values and standards, including legal norms. Thus, representatives of humanistic sociology W. Thomas and F. Znanetsky believed that their impact on actions and actions depends on the subjective position of the individual, manifested in the "social attitude" (the concept was introduced by F. Znanetsky in 1918), which is a psychological experience values, meanings and meaning of social objects and norms or the state of consciousness of an individual in relation to some of their social value [3].
The law prescribes and limits the actions of people. But it only fulfills its function when legal norms are adopted, when "legal consciousness will accept it and direct human behavior" [6, p. 40]. "The law can create the external order of life only through the internal ordering of the soul, that is, through the sense of justice" [6, p. 230]. The level of legal awareness is not limited to knowledge of legal norms. The law must be "not only realized by thought and verified by experience, but also recognized by the will of man" [6, p. 40]. Legal self-awareness is one of the aspects of an individual's normative acceptance - the conscious adoption of laws and a voluntary desire to comply with them, to obey them in their behavior and activities [1, 5]. Respect for the law and the law rests on mutual trust in
each other, citizens in power and authority in citizens, internal discipline and self-esteem.
The legal consciousness of some Russians is often assessed as insufficiently developed, subject to moral ideas [12, 13]. So, for them, the priority is the ethical category of justice, in accordance with which laws and court decisions are often evaluated.
Do laws always meet the interests of society, that is, are they always legal? Laws are a product of the state; they depend on state power. Therefore, law and law can be identical only in cases where the interests of the state and society coincide. The law can be wrong, unjust, and the law is only just, otherwise it ceases to be right, turns into its opposite - arbitrariness.
The idea that one should always respect the law and be law-abiding discredited itself after Nuremberg, which showed that laws are illegal and cannot be obeyed. The law must reflect the basic principles of justice - to protect the rights of citizens. The law is a set of rules approved by the state, for failure to comply with which the state punishes.
For a person, the category of justice is an essential criterion in evaluating laws and court decisions. According to I.A. Ilyin, the understanding of justice is accessible to normal self-awareness. Justice refers to moral concepts, as it characterizes the assessment of phenomena or actions according to the criterion of what is due, corresponding to a certain understanding of the essence of what is happening and human rights. At the same time, there are no uniform objective ideas about what is fair and what is not. Ideas about justice are subjective, but at the same time, they largely depend both on belonging to a particular society, and on the specific conditions in which the individual is, and the specifics of the formation of his legal consciousness.
The purpose of the study is to analyze the characteristics of the legal consciousness of youth and its connection with the attitudes of individuals towards justice in assessing laws and court decisions. In addition, it became clear how adequately young people were aware of their own deviations of legal consciousness, how much they were subject to reflection. Reflection is one of the ways of self-knowledge, and the latter is a source of personal development [9]. According to C. Jung [7], thanks to self-knowledge, a person corresponds to the world around him. The result of self-knowledge of their relationship with the law, law, attitudes towards justice can be the regulation of their behavior and relations with society. Related to this is the significance of the study.
Research hypotheses: 1. there is a linear relationship between the diagnostic indicators of legal consciousness and its subjective assessments by young people; 2. there is a linear relationship of diagnostic indicators of the propensity to evaluate laws and judicial decisions by the criterion of fairness and self-assessments of such propensity; 3. there is a linear relationship between the deviations of legal consciousness and the propensity to evaluate laws and court decisions by the criterion of fairness.
The study involved 80 students receiving psychological education, living in Moscow at the age of 1821. Two diagnostic methods were used.
Materials and methods. The questionnaire Attitude towards law (by V.T. Kozlova) was developed on the basis of the concept and research of A.A. Mali-novsky [10]. He supplemented the types of deformation of individual legal consciousness (legal infantilism, legal negativism, legal nihilism and legal idealism) accepted in legal science with another type - legal ego-centrism.
In the questionnaire Attitude to law, the types of deformation of legal consciousness are presented as 4 scales that reveal similar phenomena in the subjects.
1. Legal infantilism, which is characterized by the lack of formation of legal consciousness, which reveals itself in low legal awareness, in detachment from law and indifference to it. The subject does not have a clear orientation towards committing both legal and illegal actions.
2. Legal negativism, characterizing a skeptical attitude towards law as a universal regulator of social relations, since the individual often uses other social regulators (moral norms, customs, religious norms, corporate codes of conduct). It is important to note that the subject has no attitudes to commit offenses.
3. Legal idealism, which distinguishes individuals with lofty, unrealizable hopes for law, with faith in its omnipotence in the regulation of social relations.
4. Legal egocentrism, manifested in subjects who put their interests above the interests of other people and recognize the right only unilaterally, as long as it corresponds to their interests.
The questionnaire consists of 20 statements, with each of which one should express the degree of one's agreement on a scale from "disagree", "rather disagree", "rather agree", "agree". Thus, the questionnaire diagnoses the severity of the described legal distortions in individuals. For each subject, the total score and points are calculated for each scale of the questionnaire. The higher the score, the higher the deformations of legal consciousness and the lower the level of law abidance.
To assess the inclination of students to judge the fairness of laws and court decisions, the Situations method was used (by M.K. Akimova). In it, students were presented with a description of 20 real life collisions, some of which received a legal (judicial) assessment, and some were reflected in laws adopted at different levels. The subjects should evaluate the adopted judgments or laws according to their personal beliefs about fairness. There are 20 situations in the technique.
After completing the diagnostic techniques, the students were given the task to describe and evaluate on a 10-point scale (1-10) their levels of expression of those characteristics that were diagnosed. In doing so, they had to rely on their description in questionnaires. The use of such a task is due to the fact that questionnaires are often used as a means of introspection, a support so that the points and statements contained in them help the subject pay attention to those situations, attitudes, intentions, actions in which the personality and its individual features are manifested. We believed that students, using their abilities for introspection, reflection, self-esteem, would be able to describe themselves, their ideas about the diagnosed qualities.
Methods of descriptive statistics, Student's t-test Study results and discussion
and Spearman's rank correlation were used to analyze Table lshows the group averages for both methods
the results. in terms of the overall score.
Table 1.
Descriptive statistics of method indicators
Methodology Arithmetic mean Standard deviation Scatter of points
Relationship to law 21,0 (26,2%) 5,18 from 14 to 28
Self-assessment of attitudes towards law 3,74 (37,4%) 2,15 from 1,7 to 6,5
Situations 9,63(48,1%) 3,13 from 5 to 13
Self-esteem of justice 8,02(80,2%) 1,10 from 5 to 10
As can be seen from Table 1 (percentages), students overestimate the deformations of their legal consciousness, but the differences between the indicators of the Attitude to Law questionnaire and the results of self-assessment are insignificant (Student's t-test 1.91). With regard to their desire for fairness, their self-esteem is significantly higher than the indicators of the diagnostic methodology of the Situation (Student's t-crite-rion is 2, 62; p<0.01).
How can you explain the subjective overestima-tion of your deviations in legal consciousness and attitudes towards justice in comparison with diagnostic indicators? This is probably due to the fact that young people did not know well the studied personality traits, did not reflect on them. To the least extent, the overes-timation concerns the attitude to law, understanding of one's own defects of this trait. To a greater extent, this refers to the attitude to use fairness in evaluating court decisions. Awareness of the described features was shallow, students did not focus on these aspects of legal consciousness, and therefore the task set before them to assess them became unexpected. It can be assumed that the peculiarities of legal consciousness in the implicit theory of personality of many students do not occupy the first places in the hierarchy of personality traits, do not seem significant and are rarely used to assess themselves and other individuals. Self-descriptions of students testify to this. Typical in them are the following statements: "I have no interest in the legal field as long as I am not threatened with financial losses". "I do not break laws, but I don't think about my attitude to them". "I am a law-abiding person and I have never had any problems with the law."
Calculation of the linear relationship between the indicators of the methodology Attitude to law and self-assessment of one's legal consciousness showed its presence: r = 0.29, significance at the level p<0.01. obtained using the methodology Relationship to law. As for the subjective assessments of the propensity to evaluate laws and court decisions according to the criterion of fairness, their reliability in comparison with the methodology data has not been proven (Spearman correlation r = 0.15 is insignificant), but a trend has been obtained that reflects the presence of such a connection.
What are the reasons for the insignificance of the interconnection of attitudes towards fairness, assessed by the methodology, revealed through reflection? Perhaps this is due to the fact that in their self-descriptions of these attitudes, students more often considered justice more broadly than the attitude towards laws and court decisions. Typical self-descriptions: "I believe that the concept of justice is different for everyone, it is
subjective and therefore one cannot evaluate laws in fairness, law is law". "What is fair for one, unfair for another, everyone has their own interests and the same justice (for example, in business) does not happen". "Personal relationships are important for success, but justice has nothing to do with it". "I do not have situations in which I would justify my failures with unfairness."
Thus, fairness in self-descriptions of students applies not only to legal relations, but also to moral ones. Fairness characterizes the ratio and assessment of several phenomena or actions in terms of the distribution of good and evil between people. For example, the distribution of responsibilities between employees, the level of reward for the work performed (including educational work), the attitude of teachers to their educational progress.
At the next stage of the analysis, the Spearman correlation coefficient was calculated between the indicators of the diagnostic methods used - the Attitude to Law questionnaire and the Situation methodology. It is equal to 0.23 (p < 0.05). Consequently, a relationship was found between the indicators of the deviation of attitudes towards law and the propensity to evaluate laws and court decisions by the criterion of fairness.
These data are inconsistent with the results of a previous study conducted on students of the Orekhovo-Zuevsky Institute [2]. Correlation analysis of the data of Orekhovo-Zuevsky students showed that there is no reliable connection between their ideas about the fairness of laws and their level of legal awareness (r = 0.11). Moreover, there were no significant differences between the groups of students with high and low levels of deformation of legal consciousness in the tendency to assess laws and court decisions in accordance with the principle of fairness (according to the criterion of Mann-Whitney U-test differences). The discrepancies in the results of Moscow and Orekhovo-Zuev students can be explained by the fact that ideas about justice and attitudes towards laws adopted in society are of a socio-cultural nature and differ in different social groups that have different life experience, conditions of existence and education (in this case, those living in the city -million and in a provincial city). These aspects of legal culture are formed spontaneously in the daily practice of people.
Conclusions
The results of the described study allow us to draw the following conclusions. First, it has been confirmed that the phenomenon of justice in the everyday consciousness is an important criterion for assessing the legal consciousness of Russian youth, who are inclined
to view legislation and the judicial system through the prism of fairness; secondly, defects in legal awareness are directly related to the tendency to use justice to evaluate judicial decisions; thirdly, the concept of justice is subjective, that is, it has different meanings that people put into it and depends on the objects of assessment (laws and court decisions) and on other private factors, such as their own life experience, spiritual principles and values.
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