Formulating ‘Extended Identity Theory’ for Twenty-first Century Social Sciences Research: Modeling Extended Identity in Relation to Real-world Observations and Data

The basis of this paper is our paper on generic identity theory which we had published several years ago. This aforementioned paper which was tied to the concept of the psychic unity of mankind, explored among other things, the basic concepts pertaining to human identity and identity formation. Another pillar of this paper is the concept of symbiotic approach to socio-cultural change which discussed sociocultural change in globalized scenarios, and enunciated several concepts such as mind-orientation, cultural orientation, thought worlds, world views, and mind space which were used by us in several subsequent papers as well. In our paper on generic identity, we explored the origin of the term identity, explored several pre-existing terms pertaining to identity theory and also developed our own new concepts pertaining to the idea of identity. We also discussed several components of identity such as biological identity, religious identity, linguistic identity, national or territorial identity, cultural identity, social identity, economic identity, acquired identities, and other residual components of identity as per the cultural taxonomy. In this paper, we take forward the concepts we had put forth in our earlier papers, to an altogether new level and propose several real-world applications of identity theory as well. This paper also shows that observations studied from the point of view of a monolithic western culture are wrong, and multi-cultural perspectives are always necessary; this paper is therefore a part of our globalization of science movement.