Self and Identity: Understanding Self-Concept and Social Identity

Running head: INDIVIDUAL IN SOCIETY
INDIVIDUAL IN SOCIETY
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Self and identity
Self identity is the global understanding of people about themselves. Self identity is
made of self assessments that are permanent like attributes, personality, occupation, hobbies,
personality and the awareness of his or her physical attributes (Browning and Joenniemi
2017). Self identity or self concept is based on how we perceive and evaluate ourselves. I
think that self concept is being self aware. As people we always tend to separate and distinct
ourselves from others and later categorize ourselves in terms of our age, gender, size, skills
and evaluate and compare us with others on the basis of careers, traits and many more.
According to eminent psychologist there are three major components of psychologists that
are self image that is basically the view we have about our self and what do we believe. The
other is self esteem that is how much value we place on our self and the last one is the ideal
self which indicates what people aspire to be and wish for (Ismail and Tekke 2015). These
factors put forth by Carl Rogers paves way for the social identity that is mainly considered to
be our personal identity. We discover and analyze our personal identity through a mental
process. By this we assess our uniqueness and understand our personality and tend to
categorize our self on the basis of that. We categorize our self socially as well as to which
group we want to stay with and associate ourselves with. We tend to associate with people
and build a close relationship with people who have similarities and preferences just like us.
However as human beings we do judge ourselves and categorize our self but we also want to
know how people think about us.
Self image
Self image is basically the idea that one has about his or her own personality, ability
and appearance (Orth 2016). There are several categories of self image and this result from
different ways like self image is usually a result from how one person looks at the person,

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how others perceive the person and how the person thinks others think about them.
Renowned psychologist Morris Rosenberg had first introduced a theory on self-image. The
scholar discusses about the developments to self that is self esteem and the ideal self. There
are several dimensions to self image like physical dimension where an individual evaluates
their own looks and appearance, psychological dimension is where the person evaluates the
individual’s own personality, intellectual dimension where the person evaluates their own
intelligence, skill dimension is where the person evaluates their own technical and social
skills and moral dimension where the person evaluates his or her own principles and values
(Błachnio, Przepiorka and Rudnicka 2016).
It has been seen that it is necessary to have a positive self image in order to gel in the
society. Positive self image is necessary and important as the way we think and perceive
ourselves affects the feelings about ourselves and the way we interact with others around us.
Positive self image is necessary in order to boost mental, physical, emotional, spiritual and
social well being.
Self esteem
The evaluation of an individual on their worth is self esteem. Self esteem is about the
beliefs one has of oneself (Bleidorn et al. 2016). Self esteem is mostly viewed as personality
trait that mainly tends to be enduring and stable. Self esteem usually and mainly varies on
numerous beliefs about oneself like appraisal of emotions, beliefs, appearance and behaviors.
Self esteem plays an important and a significant role in the success and the motivation of a
person. It has been seen that low self esteem have help people back from succeeding in life
because a person is incapable of success when there is lack in belief. Self esteem helps people
in navigating their life with positivity and with an assertive attitude helps people in achieving
their goals.

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Ideal self
Carl Rogers, humanistic psychologist has stated that the personality is basically
composed of the component real and ideal self. Idea self is who we want to be and what we
want to aspire to become in order to create identity. The ideal self is the idealized version of
our self that we have created on the basis of our experiences from life, what the society
demands and the factors that we usually admire in our role models (Dominic et al. 2018)
Ideal self is the many roles we play in our daily lives. We always try to become a
better version of the many roles we play in our lives. People are different to each other for
example a man has many roles like a father, a son, a friend, a colleague and many more and
the man may want attain to be the best in each of these roles. This contributes to the growth
and helps in the development and keeps pushing the people in order to achieve to become the
ideal versions of the role.
This sometimes has a negative effect as sometimes people follow the wrong path and
may take wrong decisions because of the expectations of other people from us. This makes
people shape our lives in order to meet and fulfill their expectations. This is always not a
negative thing and helps people grow in a positive way.
Self identity is very important and the different aspects of self concept is important in
our lives in order to attain a positive image that helps us grow and helps in the near future
that always benefits us.
Prejudice and Discrimination
Prejudice is the perception that people have about other people on the basis of the
social group they belong from (Brandt 2017). However this is considered as a negative trait in
people and said to be an incorrect and unjustified attitude.