Complex Culture Essay

Culture: A Complex and Diverse Idea
Culture is a society’s set of unique patterns of behaviors and beliefs (Rohall, D. E., Milkie, M. A., & Lucas, J. W. (2014). Social Psychology Sociological Perspectives (3rd ed.). NJ: Pearson). Culture can be identified in many ways, it can be identified by your family, the way you feel about certain things, your decision making, and so forth. For example, I was raised in a Mexican and sort of religious household so for me, my values and beliefs differ from other peoples’. My Mexican culture taught me to value our hard work and appreciate what we have in our lives. With that belief I grew up always appreciating what I had and even what I didn’t have at times. Another concept my culture taught me was to always respect my elders and show them manners regardless of their race,

The American culture is very materialistic. People are always looking for the next best thing in technology or luxuries of any kind. They are willing to spend loads of money on something that will hold no personal meaning to them, it would just make them feel like they can afford it and look cool. Being a materialistic society also ties in with the culture identifying people by social classes (e.g. white collar, blue collar, etc.). The American culture has a group of high society people that look down on others that are not like them. They make it very clear who is in control of their society and whoever isn’t is left with following what the white collared, rich people do. The lower classes have nowhere near as much power as the higher one. One other important value that this culture takes for granted is education and the freedom of having it provided to everyone. High school kids by far are the ones that take their education for granted now because they are so caught up in technology and the teachers don’t enforce how important education is for their