Social Identity - Key takeaways
- Identity is a socially constructed phenomenon. ...
- An individual's identity can be clubbed under two categories: ascribed and achieved.
- The main factors that shape identity are social class, gender, ethnicity, age, disability, and nationality.
- Marxists, f unctionalists and postmodernists provide contrasting theoretical perspectives on identity.
What are the four perspectives in sociology?
- Structural-Functional Theory. Our first theory is called structural-functional theory. ...
- Social Conflict Theory. The second major theoretical perspective in sociology is called social conflict theory. ...
- Feminism. Theory three out of four is feminism. ...
What is the social self in sociology?
Updated May 15, 2018. From a classical sociological perspective, the self is a relatively stable set of perceptions of who we are in relation to ourselves, others, and to social systems. The self is socially constructed in the sense that it is shaped through interaction with other people. As with socialization in general, the individual is not a passive participant in this process and have a powerful influence over how this process and its consequences develop.
What does social identity theory mean?
Social identity theory, in social psychology, the study of the interplay between personal and social identities. Social identity theory aims to specify and predict the circumstances under which individuals think of themselves as individuals or as group members. The theory also considers the consequences of personal and social identities for individual perceptions and group behaviour.
What is spoiled identity in sociology?
This attribute divides people into those-who-are-normal and those-who-are-not, thereby making those-who-are-not less worthy. Spoiled identities include racial minority, ethnic minority, sexual orientation, gender, sex, and religious identities, body size, and visible and invisible disabilities.
What is an example of identity in sociology?
Examples of social identities are race/ethnicity, gender, social class/socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, (dis)abilities, and religion/religious beliefs.
What is the concept of identity?
Identity encompasses the memories, experiences, relationships, and values that create one's sense of self. This amalgamation creates a steady sense of who one is over time, even as new facets are developed and incorporated into one's identity.
How is identity formed sociology?
This may be through individuation whereby the undifferentiated individual tends to become unique, or undergoes stages through which differentiated facets of a person's life tend toward becoming a more indivisible whole. Individuals gain a social identity and group identity by their affiliations.
Why is identity important in society?
Why is identity important? Having an identity can give you a sense of belonging, which is important to your well-being and confidence. You might make friends with others who have similar interests to you. This will make you both more optimistic and also more open to people from different backgrounds.
What are characteristics of identity?
Identity is simply defined as the characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is. Elements or characteristics of identity would include race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, physical attributes, personality, political affiliations, religious beliefs, professional identities, and so on.
What factors influence identity?
Identity formation and evolution are impacted by a variety of internal and external factors like society, family, loved ones, ethnicity, race, culture, location, opportunities, media, interests, appearance, self-expression and life experiences.
What is identity and why is it important?
Simply speaking, identity is a combination of your physical and behavioural traits that define who you are. For example, your name is part of your identity, as is the form and colour of your eyes and your fingerprint. This set of characteristics allows you to be definitively and uniquely recognisable.
What are the two main characteristics of identity?
Identity has two important features: continuity and contrast. Continuity means that people can count on you to be the same person tomorrow as you are today. Obviously, people change but many important aspects of social identity remain relatively stable such as gender, surname, language and ethnicity.
What is self-concept and identity?
The 'self' concept In general, 'identity' is used to refer to one's social 'face' – how one perceives how one is perceived by others. 'Self' is generally used to refer to one's sense of 'who I am and what I am' and is the way the term is employed in this book.
What is identity and why is it important?
Simply speaking, identity is a combination of your physical and behavioural traits that define who you are. For example, your name is part of your identity, as is the form and colour of your eyes and your fingerprint. This set of characteristics allows you to be definitively and uniquely recognisable.
What are 2 aspects of identity?
Identity has two important features: continuity and contrast. Continuity means that people can count on you to be the same person tomorrow as you are today. Obviously, people change but many important aspects of social identity remain relatively stable such as gender, surname, language and ethnicity.
What is your identity made up of?
Personality traits, abilities, likes and dislikes, your belief system or moral code, and the things that motivate you — these all contribute to self-image or your unique identity as a person. People who can easily describe these aspects of their identity typically have a fairly strong sense of who they are.
List three examples of ascribed identities.
The three examples of ascribed identities are social class, ethnicity, and gender.
What is a transgender?
Individuals who identify with a role or gender expression that differs from the sex they were assigned since birth are called transgender.
What is hybrid identity?
Hybrid identity can be identified when an individual’s sense of ‘who they are’ is formed out of two or more characteristics.
What is the ‘underclass’?
The term ‘underclass’ essentially draws attention towards those who are exempted from educational, health, and professional opportunities. Members...
How does ‘age’ shape one’s identity?
Sociologists argue that age is a social construct, and learned during primary and secondary socialisation. It is broadly categorised into childhood...
Who are transsexuals?
When transgender individuals undergo medical procedures (surgery, therapy, etc) and alter their bodies to align with a gender identity, they are ca...
What is collective identity?
When people tend to identify with other members of their group (class), it gives them a sense of collective identity.
What are the three stages of social identity theory?
The three stages are categorisation, identification, and comparison.
Who is the 'middle class'?
The middle class is a diverse group containing people from different social and work backgrounds. People in this category might not be owners of a...
What is the merit of the book Identity?
A particular merit of the book is that its breadth and depth are understandable to undergraduates while being useful to professionals interested in knowing more about the roots of Stryker’s identity theory.
When was the book Role Identity first published?
First published in 1966 , this is a clearly written and comprehensive book-length treatise on the foundation and many facets of both processual and structural symbolic interactionist viewpoints on roles and identities. This much-cited book is particularly known for its erudite introduction to the authors’ seminal sociological social psychological role identity theory.
What are the four identities?
We outline four identity theories typically employed by contemporary social psychologists: personal identity, role identity, social identity, and collective identity . Personal identity (see [Personal] Identity Theory ), the most elementary of the four identities, was pioneered by American sociological social psychologists (SSPs), particularly Sheldon Stryker. SSPs emphasize how demographic, social, and cultural factors affect human social interaction. Personal identity is what makes every person unique, defining them through their specific biographies (e.g., name, birthplace), unique characteristics (e.g., intelligent, athletic), role identities (e.g., daughter, employee), and particular combination of private and public experiences. Role identify (see Role Identity Theory ), also pioneered by American SSPs, particularly George J. McCall and J. L. Simmons, is inspired by the language of dramaturgy. Role identity is defined as the role (or character) people play when holding specific social positions in groups. It is relational, since people interact with each other via their own role identities. Social identity (see Social Identity Theory ), pioneered by European psychological social psychologists, particularly Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner, emphasizes how a person’s cognition, affect, and personality traits affect immediate person-to-person social interactions and vice versa. It is the part of an individual’s self-concept formed through the knowledge of his or her membership in meaningful social groups and organizations (e.g., Kiwanis Club, the Cleveland City Club) and categories (e.g., Native American, northerner). In short, it is through our public selves that we are able to simplify the world around us by using categorizations to infer our similarities and differences to other people. Finally, collective identity (see Collective Identity Theory ), also pioneered by European psychological social psychologists, especially Alberto Melucci, is the self in action. Collective identities are especially important to social movement participants, political activists, and others banding together to fight for or against social change by working on shared goals and action plans. In short, it is a process by which a set of individuals interacts to create a shared sense of identity or group consciousness.
What is psychological centrality?
The concept of psychological centrality views the self as an interrelated system of hierarchically organized components (e.g., identities and personal attributes). Psychological centrality helps people protect their self-concepts by pushing potentially damaging self-components to the periphery of the self system while holding self-enhancing ones closer to the center.
What is social identity?
Updated July 22, 2019. Social identity is the part of the self that is defined by one’s group memberships. Social identity theory, which was formulated by social psychologist Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s, describes the conditions under which social identity becomes more important than one’s identity as an individual.
When was social identity first defined?
On the basis of this research, Tajfel first defined the concept of social identity in 1972. The concept of social identity was created as a means to consider the way one conceptualizes the self-based on the social groups to which one belongs. Then, Tajfel and his student John Turner introduced social identity theory in 1979.
What is the purpose of the cognitive process theory?
The theory aimed to illuminate both the cognitive processes that lead people to define their group memberships and the motivational processes that enable people to maintain positive social identity by favorably comparing their social group to other groups.
How do people feel about themselves?
As a general rule, people are motivated to feel positive about themselves and maintain their self-esteem. The emotional investments people make in their group memberships results in their self-esteem being tied to the social standing of their in-groups. Consequently, a positive evaluation of one's in-group in comparison to relevant out-groups results in a positive social identity. If a positive evaluation of one's in-group isn’t possible, however, individuals will generally employ one of three strategies: 1 Individual mobility. When an individual does not view her group favorably, she can attempt to leave the current group and join one with a higher social standing. Of course, this won’t alter the status of the group, but it can alter the status of the individual. 2 Social creativity. In-group members can enhance the social standing of their existing group by adjusting some element of the between-group comparison. This can be accomplished by choosing a different dimension on which to compare the two groups, or by adjusting value judgments so that what was once thought to be negative is now considered positive. Another option is to compare the in-group to a different out-group—specifically, an out-group that has a lower social status. 3 Social competition. In-group members can attempt to enhance the group's social status by collectively working to improve their situation. In this case, the in-group competes directly with an out-group with the objective of reversing the group's social positions on one or more dimensions.
What are the three processes of social identity?
Cognitive Processes of Social Identity. Social identity theory specifies three mental processes individuals go through to make in-group/out-group classifications. The first process, social categorization, is the process by which we organize individuals into social groups in order to understand our social world.
What is social categorization?
Social categorization generally results in an emphasis on the similarities of people in the same group and the differences between people in separate groups. One can belong to a variety of social categories, but different categories will be more or less important depending on social circumstances.
Why do people feel positive about themselves?
As a general rule, people are motivated to feel positive about themselves and maintain their self-esteem. The emotional investments people make in their group memberships results in their self-esteem being tied to the social standing of their in-groups. Consequently, a positive evaluation of one's in-group in comparison to relevant out-groups ...
How does discourse differ from ideology?
Discourse differs to the concept of ideology because ideology presupposes a real which is beyond ideology which the ideology obscures – to speak of discourses is to speak of the knowledges which produce the truth. Foucault, in fact talks of the politics of truth.
What is Michel Foucault's work on identity?
A summary of Michel Foucault’s work on identity, deviance and normality, governmentality, subjectification and technologies of the self, taken from Steph Lawler’s ‘Identity’ (2014) – also includes Nikolas Rose’s development of Foucault’s work.
How does subjectification affect people?
Through subjectification, people become tied to specific identities, they become subjects, but they also become subject-ed to the rules and norms engendered by a set of knowledges about these identities.
What does Nikolas Rose call the norm of autonomy?
What Nikolas Rose calls the ‘norm of autonomy’ has become an orthodoxy in many discussions about identity – but we should consider the argument that when we are incited to be ‘free’, we are then the most enmeshed in in the workings of power – the relationship of the self to itself within a contemporary project of self-actualisation, self-awareness and self-improvement has become a norm which ties us to relentless self-scrutiny, in which we watch ourselves for signs of deviancy and wrong doing.
Is the self a project?
In the contemporary West it is hard to avoid the idea that the self is a project to be worked on. We see this everywhere, but especially in self-help books, therapy, the various experts promising to guide us through different stages of our lives and, of course, in the media: in chat-shows and ‘make-over’ programmes for example.
When was Identity and Social Change published?
Identity and Social Change. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2000
What is Mike Featherstone's theory of identity formation?
Mike Featherstone outlines a rethinking of citizenship and identity-formation in light of the realities of globalization and new information technologies. The second part opens with Robert G. Dunn's examination of cultural commodification and the attenuation of self and social relations, in which he argues that media, marketplace, ...
What is the meaning of identity?
Identity encompasses the memories, experiences, relationships, and values that create one’s sense of self. This amalgamation creates a steady sense of who one is over time, even as new facets are developed and incorporated into one's identity.
What is the role of identity in life?
Identity formation involves three key tasks: Discovering and developing one’s potential, choosing one’s purpose in life, and finding opportunities to exercise that potential and purpose. Identity is also influenced by parents and peers during childhood and experimentation in adolescence.
Why is ego identity important?
The ego identity helps to merge all the different versions of oneself (the parent self, the career self, the sexual self) into one cohesive whole, so that if disaster strikes, there's a stable sense of self.
Why is authenticity important in relationships?
Relationships can come under threat when there’s a disconnect between expressing yourself freely and taking your partner’s feelings into account. The Authenticity in Relationships scale—which measures this construct through statements such as “I am fully aware of when to insist on myself and when to compromise”—can initiate discussion and help couples cultivate a healthy balance.
What is identity in sketch?
< g id="-small" stroke="none" stroke-width="1" fill="none" fill-rule="evenodd">. Identity encompasses the values people hold, which dictate the choices they make. An identity contains multiple roles—such as a mother, teacher, and U.S. citizen—and each role holds meaning and expectations that are internalized into one’s identity.
Why is identity so complex?
One reason why may be that the answer is so complex. Identity includes the many relationships people cultivate, such as their identity as a child, friend, partner, and parent. It involves external characteristics over which a person has little or no control, such as height, race, or socioeconomic class. Identity also encompasses political opinions, ...
When does identity formation start?
Identity formation is most acute during adolescence, but the process doesn’t stop after the teen years. Taking on a new role, such as becoming a parent, can make self-definition a lifelong process.
