The aim of the research is to study the features of the social environment as potential conditions for the formation, functioning and evolution of latent social groups. Hypotheses: 1) there are pre-forms of social alliances of people (which can be tentatively called latent social groups); 2) diff erent conditions of a subject’s external and internal environment (including features perceived by a person as subjectively signifi cant for them in relation to certain life goals) might be the reasons why the pre-forms appear.