The Identity If an Individual within the Cultural Sphere

Question: How Do To Identity If an Individual within the Cultural Sphere? Answer: Introducation: The identity if an individual within the cultural sphere has been a matter of concern for numerous fields in social science. The concept of identity is there in all the present, past and future time frames. I am what I was in the past and both my past and present beings focus on the future being of me. This is also possible that one feels much disassociated from the past being and the future expectations of that identity seems to be conflicted. There are different senses of identities in a self; my feelings of identity when I am a home at 3 a.m. in the night might seem a lot different and pensive than my feelings of identity when I am at work at 3 p.m. Therefore, the scholars have recognized a distinct variation in the self and identity that constitutes the societal views of the individual self along with the unconscious and conscious sense of identity within the individual. The unconscious picture of the brain has been mostly drawn from the generalizations of past experiences, as th rough these brain connects among different modules (Van der Werff, Steg and Keizer 2013). Even if, the term self identity has been defined in so many methods across different disciplines, it has not been explained understanding each of the aspects. The question, Who are you? may sound simple, but it is a lot difficult when I am having a tough time in choosing words to define my personality. It is a complicated idea. When someone asks me to say something about myself, I mostly describe my family, hobbies, language, job, religious belief, nationality etc. However, ones moral belief and values cannot be understood from this information. That can only be explained by the individual. We all tend to develop an identity of the self that can distinguish one from others. Therefore, the society plays a crucial role in developing the definition of identity. As we can see in the past, in most of the historical cultures, being healthy and weighty was considered to be a symbol of wealth, when thin people were considered to be lower class. However, now television and media has focused o n being thin and the health conscious which lead the society to consider being thin more impressive and desired. Therefore, in developing the self identity, I may not avoid these societal notions. The Social Identity theory indicates that we tend to define ourselves by distinct social categories where we thing that we belong to such as political or social associations, nationality, language etc (Hogg 2016). Being an Australian or a native speaker of English language is a part of my identity. It helps to develop myself. The concept of social identity is a combination of perceptions and ideals of the social groups. However, there are two sides of the social identity, external and internal or we may say conscious and unconscious. Both the sides make self identity so tricky that we tend to think and act like the society wants us to do. These thoughts also hamper our sense of self esteem, as we tend to fee a higher self esteem when we are in out comfortable group, whereas we tend to feel a lower when we think that we are not being able to live up to the social mark. Therefore, we tend to develop our external self identity according to the societal norms. Prejudice and Discrimination Prejudice and discriminations are the rising issues in the modern society. Prejudice is a sense towards an individual that is defined on the basis of their specific affiliation to a certain group. The sense of discrimination can also be derived from this definition, as it is the sense of treating someone or making a particular distinction in the favour or against of the group, rather than focusing on his or her individual merit (Fishbein 2014). Being prejudiced is a mindset which relies on the unpleasant or negative stereotypes about the individuals or a group of individuals due to their religion, culture, ethnicity or gender. The discrimination and prejudice are very common both at the social and individual levels. We see numerous examples of these problems in our everyday life. On the basis of the prejudiced discrimination, there can be numbers of discriminatory judgment on different levels. Most of the time, we make stereotypical judgments on the basis of the appearance of someone . Gender discrimination is one of the major discrimination that we see in our everyday life. Most of the time, women are considered as the weaker sex who need protection from the difficulties of life. They are considered to be delicate and often victims of the emotional and physical abuse (Bar-Tal et al. 2013). When I was working in a retail outlet as a customer service executive, I have seen the women employees to be treated as weak and temporary employees. The management had never considered the women employees to compete in a difficult situation. Even today, most of the organizations do not want to promote women employees as they may not be as involved as the male employees due to their family responsibilities and pregnancy. Another discrimination is made by the prejudices society is the discrimination against the disabled people. People having mental or physical impairment are considered to be the victimized or the weaker ones. This is also an instance of direct discrimination wher e they are not treated equally even if they have individual merit. Not only these, there are numerous instances of racial discrimination and prejudice in the society, even if the in the multi racial society. Every day we experience some kind of discriminatory judgements in our surrounding. Attraction and Closed relationship Relationships, particularly the trustworthy and closed relationships are very significant to the psychological and social growth of an individual being. In such relationships, we tend to carve for emotional support, love and acceptance. These are human traits and we strive for such interpersonal relationship to fulfil the void in our lives along with making the sense of life through the experiences of caring, trust and sharing (Brees et al. 2014). During different phases of our lives, we come across some people who come as different experiences in our lives. In my high school, I met some interesting personalities in the classroom. I made friends with some of them. However, I used to hang out with several people, but I only developed a close friendship with two of them, Davis and Sarah. Scholars suggest that, interpersonal relationships can develop at different phases of life. My friendship with one of my childhood neighbour Betty had gone through different stages of life. We had experienced so many things together from childhood, it made our bond stronger. According to Knapps model, the interpersonal relationship goes through different stages such as initiating, experimenting, intensifying and integrating (Fox, Warber and Makstaller 2013). Therefore, we have crossed all these phases together, thus developed a stronger bond with time. However, with my other friends, Davis and Sarah, I also crossed those stages to develop a bond with them. While I joined the school, during the first initiating phase, we mostly talked about syllabus and living arrangements in the dormitory and gathered common information about each other. In the experimenting phase, we engaged ourselves in small talks and talked more about the common grounds. During the third phase we three developed a very close friendship as most of our subjects were same and we were taking classes together. We started sharing our personal thoughts and shared a common life together. Thus a personal relationship or a friendship grows through different stages of life References Bar-Tal, D., Graumann, C.F., Kruglanski, A.W. and Stroebe, W. eds., 2013.Stereotyping and prejudice: Changing conceptions. Springer Science Business Media. Brees, J., Mackey, J., Martinko, M. and Harvey, P., 2014. The mediating role of perceptions of abusive supervision in the relationship between personality and aggression.Journal of Leadership Organizational Studies,21(4), pp.403-413. Dugel, P.U., Abulon, D.J. and Dimalanta, R., 2015. Comparison of attraction capabilities associated with high-speed, dual-pneumatic vitrectomy probes.Retina,35(5), pp.915-920. Fishbein, H.D., 2014.Peer prejudice and discrimination: The origins of prejudice. Psychology Press. 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