Personal choice: strategic life decision-making and conscience

The article highlights the problem of subjective choice in making strategic life decisions and its correlation with conscience. The study describes the nature of strategic life decision-making, determines types of strategic life decisions, discloses the essence of human experiences associated with strategic life decision-making, and provides results of empirical research. Decision-making, as viewed in scientific psychological practice, is an intense cognitive process for which a human actor should be prepared to perform, drawing upon a full range of knowledge, abilities, skills, and personal qualities. Decisions, though varied by type and degree of difficulty and complexity, are united by choice – that is the individual’s choice as such. Crucial moments of decision-making may affect people in myriad ways. This article analyses the experiences of such human actors while making strategic life decisions, defined by scientists to mean outstanding, fateful, associated with great responsibility, with their leading role in human living space, and formation of a person’s way of living. Emotions and emotional responses occupy a space of paramount importance in this type of decision-making. As strategic life decisions are cognizantly and predominantly made mainly in late adolescence, the authors present summarized results of the empirical research that was carried out for several years among students enrolled in a variety of higher educational institutions within Ukraine.