Social constructionism is a theoretical approach in the social sciences that challenges the idea of an objective, discoverable reality.
Instead, it asserts that the phenomena of our social world are actively constructed through the language, images, and discourses that people use in their everyday interactions.
Rather than discovering truths about human nature, social constructionism argues that our understanding of reality, ourselves, and others is a product of our specific cultural and historical contexts.
Theoretical Assumptions
However, social constructionists share four beliefs and practices in common (Burr, 2015):
A critical stance toward knowledge that is normally taken for granted
Social constructionists believe that conventional knowledge is not necessarily based on objective, unbiased observations of the world.
Humans, according to Social Constructionism, put more emphasis on certain categories than others, even if these categories do not necessarily reflect real divisions.
Thus, it is the obligation of sociologists and psychologists to be aware of the assumptions implicit in knowledge. What exists is what we perceive to exist (Burr, 2015).
Critique of Mainstream Science
Social constructionism is highly critical of positivism: the beliefs that the methods of the natural sciences are the only way to uncover objective truth.
SC argues that the traditional laboratory experiment strips human behaviour of its vital, real-world context (“context-stripping”) and relies on the false assumption that a researcher can be entirely objective and value-free.
More radically, some constructionists argue that even the “hard” sciences do not merely map reality.
Instead, scientific facts are fabricated through laboratory negotiations, equipment choices, and institutional consensus.
Knowledge exists in a historical and cultural context
All ways of understanding are historically and culturally relative. What is thought of as natural, and the categories and concepts we use, are an effect of history and culture.
For example, historically, children took on many “adult” tasks (Aries, 1962), but the mid-20th century brought a renewed emphasis on child development and childhood, and thus the role of children changed.
It should not be assumed that the ways of understanding that belong to one time and cultural context are necessarily better than another (Burr 2015).
Knowledge is sustained by social processes
Knowledge is constructed through interactions between people and the world.
Thus, an individual’s perception of “truth” is a product of social processes and the interactions that an individual is engaging in rather than objective observation (Burr 2015).
Knowledge and social action go together
Each understanding of the world has a variety of “social constructions” that come with it.
As stated by (Burr 2015), before the temperance movement, alcoholics were seen as entirely responsible for their behavior — meaning that an appropriate response would be imprisonment.
However, after Temperance, alcoholism shifted into a sickness, flaying responsibility away from its victims. The solution became medical and psychological treatment rather than imprisonment (Burr, 2015).
Examples
Social constructionism challenges the assumption that our observations reveal the objective, true nature of the world, arguing instead that the categories and concepts we use to understand reality are products of historical and cultural processes.
From this perspective, many aspects of human life that we often assume to be “natural” or biologically hardwired are actually fabricated through language, societal norms, and everyday human interactions.
1. Mental Illness and Abnormal Behaviour
What a society defines as “normal” or “abnormal” is highly dependent on cultural contexts, moral codes, and shifting historical values.
Rather than being purely objective medical diseases, mental health categories are often social constructions.
- The “Myth” of Mental Illness: The psychiatrist Thomas Szasz famously argued that the concept of mental illness was invented by society to stigmatise and subjugate people whose behaviour violates accepted legal or social norms. Szasz contended that because psychological symptoms lack detectable physical abnormalities in the body, they should be classified as “problems in living” rather than genuine medical diseases.
- Shifting Diagnoses: The socially constructed nature of abnormality is evident in how diagnoses change over time. For example, homosexuality was historically classified as a mental illness and a paraphilia in diagnostic manuals. As cultural values and social norms evolved, it was depathologised and removed from these manuals, illustrating that the definition of a disorder often reflects societal prejudice rather than a stable medical fact.
- Cultural Variations in Disorders: Conditions like depression are experienced and defined differently depending on cultural expectations. In Western societies, such as the United States, there is a strong normative pressure to present a happy, positive self, meaning that sadness is frequently medicalised as a dysfunction.
2. Gender and Sex
While biological sex relates to chromosomes and anatomy, gender refers to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings, roles, and behaviours that a society associates with masculinity and femininity.
- Cultural Relativism of Gender Roles: Margaret Mead’s classic 1935 anthropological research in New Guinea demonstrated that gender roles are not biologically determined but socially constructed. She found that in the Mundugumour tribe, both males and females exhibited “masculine”, aggressive behaviour; in the Arapesh tribe, both sexes exhibited “feminine”, nurturing behaviour; and in the Tchambuli tribe, Western gender roles were entirely inverted, with women being dominant and men being emotionally dependent.
- Multiple Gender Categories: The rigid two-gender system is a specific cultural inheritance of Euro-American societies. Many cultures socially construct more than two genders to accommodate human diversity. Examples include the berdache (a variant gender in Native American cultures), the hijras in India, the kathoeys in Thailand, and the xanith in Oman.
- Gender as a Performance: The philosopher Judith Butler argued that gender is not a natural expression of internal biology, but rather an “impersonation” or a performance. People are taught a set of idealised norms and they enact these identities in their daily lives. Butler even extended this to biological sex, arguing that the binary division of “male” and “female” bodies is itself a patriarchal social construct designed to keep non-males in a subordinated position.
3. The Self and Personal Identity
Mainstream psychology often treats the “self” as a private, fixed entity located inside the individual’s mind.
Social constructionists, however, argue that concepts like the “I”, the “ego”, and the “mind” do not correspond to objective physical realities; they are hypothetical constructs embedded in our language that help us structure our experiences.
- The Self as a Social Process: Sociologists and discursive psychologists argue that the self is an ever-changing process constructed and maintained purely through social interaction and language. Without interaction and recognition from “the Other” (other people), we would not have a concept of our own identity.
- Cultural Constructions of the Self: The very way we experience our identity depends on the culture we are raised in. Western cultures socialise individuals to have an independent view of the self—seeing identity as autonomous, internal, and distinct from others. In contrast, many Asian and non-Western cultures foster an interdependent view of the self, where identity is fundamentally constructed through relationships, social roles, and group harmony.
- Postmodern “Decentred” Self: In contemporary society, Kenneth Gergen notes a phenomenon of “multiphrenia,” where the individual is exposed to so many conflicting values, opinions, and cultures that the idea of a single “authentic” self becomes impossible. The self is fractured and continuously redefined by outside forces.
4. Race and Kinship
- Race: Biological anthropology has repeatedly demonstrated that there is no scientifically justifiable way to divide the human population into distinct biological races; there is more genetic variation within so-called racial categories than between them. Therefore, race does not exist in nature. However, it exists profoundly as a social reality—a “folk taxonomy” embedded in language, practices, and institutions that has been constructed to organise societies, often to structure inequality and justify discrimination.
- Kinship: While reproduction is biological, kinship—the network of social relationships, obligations, and definitions of who is related to whom—is a sociocultural construction. The specific rules determining how closely two people are related vary so widely across cultures that individuals considered “cousins” in one society may not be considered related at all in another.
5. Scientific Knowledge and Facts
Perhaps the most radical claim of social constructionism is that even the “hard” sciences and “objective facts” are socially constructed.
- The Creation of “Truth”: Constructionists argue that scientific theories do not simply map a pre-existing reality; instead, they are created through the social interactions, rhetorical strategies, and negotiations of researchers.
- Laboratory Constructs: Sociologists of science, such as Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, have studied scientific laboratories and concluded that scientific “facts” are constructed through micro-processes like local tacit negotiations, institutionalised gestures, and changing evaluations. What a society accepts as “knowledge” is essentially whatever that specific community confidently agrees upon and invests with authority, rather than an absolute reflection of the universe.
6. Crime & Deviance
Social construction of crime and deviance is the theory that behaviors and actions are not inherently criminal, but are labeled deviant by those in power within a social context.
What a society defines as deviant depends on norms, values, and interests of the powerful and privileged at a particular time and place.
Social constructionism holds that the meaning of acts, behaviors, and events is not an objective quality of phenomena but one assigned to them by people through social interactions. Shifts in public perception can lead to an act taking on a different meaning than it once had.
Social constructionism can influence whether or not something is seen as a crime, its severity, and the extent to which it is feared. How societies define and remedy crime is the outcome of numerous complex factors between different groups of actors.
There are numerous examples of crimes that were once considered not to be social problems, and actions that were once illegal that are now not widely considered to be crimes.
For example, various laws have been created and nullified against homosexuality, bullying, and drug use depending on public perception.
7. Language and Discourse
For social constructionists, language is not just a neutral tool used to describe a pre-existing world; rather, language creates the world.
We are born into a society where conceptual frameworks already exist, and as we acquire language, we adopt these frameworks to structure our experiences.
This view is closely aligned with the linguistic relativity hypothesis, which proposes that the language we use actively determines or influences our thoughts.
Furthermore, the branch of SC known as discursive psychology shifts the focus away from hidden, internal cognitive states.
Instead of viewing things like attitudes, memories, or emotions as private mental objects, discursive psychologists view them as actions performed during social exchange.
When we speak, we are formulating arguments, justifications, or blame within a specific cultural context.
Critical Evaluation
While social constructionism (SC) has provided valuable tools for unmasking biases, ideologies, and power dynamics within mainstream psychology and science, it has also faced severe backlash.
Critics argue that by treating all knowledge as a byproduct of human interaction and language, SC creates profound philosophical, scientific, and practical problems.
Here are the primary criticisms leveled against social constructionism:
1. Extreme Relativism and the “Anything Goes” Mentality
The most common and arguably most damaging criticism of social constructionism is that it inevitably leads to extreme relativism.
If scientific knowledge is purely an artifact of communal exchange and no objective “truth” exists, then it becomes impossible to claim that one theory is objectively better than another.
- Inability to Weigh Theories: Critics point out that if all worldviews are just different social constructions, we are left with a “proliferation of theoretical perspectives without the means to weigh the valuable and sound, and the non-valuable and un-sound”.
- Incommensurability: If different paradigms or cultural viewpoints are completely “incommensurable” (meaning they cannot be compared using a neutral standard), then all theories are effectively equal, making it impossible to sift good, accurate theories from bad ones. This leads to an “anything goes” mentality where scientific progress is indistinguishable from propaganda or mob psychology.
2. The Logical Paradox of Reflexivity
Philosophers often point out that strict relativism is fundamentally self-defeating.
- If a social constructionist declares that no utterance or theory can be objectively true because all knowledge is merely a product of the person or society uttering it, then the statement “social constructionism is true” must itself be false or merely a localized opinion.
3. Denial of Physical Reality and the Natural World
Critics argue that social constructionism focuses so heavily on language and social discourse that it risks “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” by denying the tangible, physical realities of the body, disease, and death.
- The Inherent Structure of the World: Philosopher of science Ian Hacking argues that while the ideas we use (such as the concept of “quarks”) might be socially constructed, the actual physical objects themselves (the quarks) “are not constructs, are not social, and are not historical”. The physical world possesses an inherent structure that science genuinely discovers, rather than invents.
- Practical Survival: Critics ask a highly practical question: in a world made purely of linguistic constructions, how do we find a cure for a devastating disease, or protect our bodies from extreme heat and cold?. SC ignores the fact that humans must have active, practical contact with the physical environment to survive, and that the physical world imposes hard limits on what we can successfully “construct”.
4. Amoral Consequences
From an anthropological and ethical standpoint, an extreme relativist approach can be seen as entirely amoral.
If we must accept that every cultural belief or practice is just another equally valid “construction,” it becomes difficult or impossible to condemn actions that are violent, exploitative, or objectively harmful.
Critics argue that a refusal to judge other cultural constructs paralyzes our ability to intervene in human rights abuses.
5. Exaggerated Linguistic Determinism
Social constructionism is heavily reliant on the idea that language creates our reality, an idea that aligns with the linguistic relativity hypothesis (or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).
Critics of this view point out that the extent to which language determines thought is often wildly exaggerated.
For example, the famous claim that Inuit people have vastly different perceptions of the world because they have dozens of words for “snow” has been challenged.
Evidence shows they have relatively few such words, and that environmental needs drive language creation, rather than language completely dictating human reality.
History
The first sociologist writing in the tradition of social constructionism was Mead (1930), in his book, Mind, Self, and Society.
Mead created the concept of “symbolic interactionism,” which argues that humans construct their own and each other’s identities through their everyday encounters with each other. In other words, the self is created through social interaction.
Although there were intermediating theories such as ethnomethodology in the 1950s and 60s, Berger and Luckmann (1966) became the next pivotal writers of Social Constructionism in The Social Construction of Reality.
The Social Construction of Reality is widely considered to be one of sociology’s most seminal works.
Berger and Luckman’s The Social Construction of Reality
Although first published as a rather esoteric book on the sociology of knowledge. The Social Construction of Reality soon came to define a field of “new sociologies” (Vera, 2016). Best societa mutamento politica).
In short, The Social Construction of Reality argues that humans create and sustain all social phenomena through their social practices. People “externalize” their thoughts on the world, such as writing down or creating a story about an idea they have.
As other people tell this story or read the book, this idea becomes an “object” of consciousness for the people the idea spreads to.
The idea, to these people, becomes an objective truth. And finally, in the last stage, the idea becomes “internalized” in the consciousness of the society, and future generations more or less take the idea for granted as an objective truth, as the idea already exists in the world they were born into (Burr 2015).
Berger and Luckmann’s work is essentially anti-essentialist.
Essentialism is the belief that objects have a certain set of characteristics that make them what they are.
However, Berger and Luckmann argue that there is no “essence” to “objective” truths that make them fact.
Facts are not given to a cultural surrounding or a social environment, or even biological factors; rather, the world, according to Berger and Luckmann, is constructed through the social practices of people, and yet, people can still behave as though the world is pre-defined and fixed (Burr, 2015).
Gergen’s Social Psychology as History
In the 1960s and 70s, social psychologists became increasingly concerned with how the field of social psychology promoted the views of dominant groups (Burr 2015).
There was a shift from focusing on objectivity and laboratory behavior to accounts of the lives of ordinary people (Harre & Secord, 1972).
In “Social Psychology as History” (1973), Gergen argues that while the methods used in psychology itself are scientific, the theories of social behavior that originate from psychologists are actually reflections of contemporary history.
Unlike the natural sciences, Gergen argues, which are based on a set of relatively unchanging principles, human interaction happens on the basis of a number of factors that shift rapidly with time (Gergen, 1973). Social theories describe what is perceived to be and prescribe what is seen as desirable.
For example, as social psychology arose in the Second World War, with the goal of creating propaganda, questions of keeping up morale and encouraging uncommon behavior (such as eating an unpopular food) — “desirable” behaviors — shaped the field’s basis (Burr, 2015).
Thus, social theories are symptoms of the social, political, and economic realms of the times in which they were devised; thus, sociologists can read social theories of behavior as a history.
Social Constructionism and Postmodernism
Historically, sociology has searched for underlying structures that lead to human behavior. Social constructionism evolved in the cultural and intellectual context of the mid-20th century, which was dominated by the Postmodernist movement.
Postmodernism is the rejection that there can be the ultimate truth. To postmodernists, the world, as it is perceived by individuals, is a consequence of hidden structures.
The world cannot be understood in terms of grand theories; rather, postmodernism emphasizes how ways of life can differ between the groups and situations of the people who live them (Burr 2015). Postmodernism has both informed and been informed by social constructionism; however, these theories diverge.
Social constructionism provides a framework for understanding the constructed worlds that people inhabit — useful for understanding social behavior, while postmodernism does not provide such a framework (Flaskas, 1995).
Malcolm Spector and John I. Kitsuse’s Social Constructionism
Traditionally, sociologists have thought of social problems as conditions that cause some harm to society. However, four years after Gergen’s Social Psychology as History, the sociologists Kituse and Malcolm extended the concept of social problems using Constructionism in a way considered radical by sociologists.
Spector (1977) argued in Constructing Social Problems that sociologists had altogether failed to create a conception of social problems specific to sociology.
That is to say, up to the publication of Constructing Social Problems, sociologists had difficulties describing what a social problem was. What seemingly created harm in one society could be considered normal or even taken for granted in other circumstances.
Spector defined social problems as “the activities of individuals or groups making assertions of grievances and claims with respect to some putative conditions” (Best, 2018).
In this definition, social conditions were not the stuff of social problems — rather, it was whether or not people considered conditions to be a problem that made them problems. “what people are.” but beyond this, Spector used this concept as a guide to sociological research and writing (Schneider 2018).
Key Contrasts
Realism and Relativism
Social constructionism is essentially anti-realist and pro-relativist (Hammersley 1992). Knowledge is not a direct perception of reality.
Because all knowledge excerpts are in a historically and culturally relativistic context, the notion of a singular “truth,” according to social constructionists, does not exist.
Because sociology and social psychology have historically sought the “truth” behind human behavior, social constructionism offers markedly different implications for how sociologists should conduct sociology.
This has manifested in a shift toward an emphasis on recounting the experiences of individuals rather than on creating “grand theories” ” of human behavior beginning in the 1960s and 1970s.
The validity of social constructionism’s anti-realist pro-relativist stance is still heavily debated, notably in the form of the “Death and Furniture” argument of Edwards and Potter (1995).
Strong vs. Weak Social Constructionism
Some sociologists apply weak social constructionism to their research, while others apply strong social constructionism.
Weak social constructionism has the assumption that individuals construct individual understandings over a set of objective facts, while strong social constructionism holds that all knowledge is constructed by human society through social interactions (Amineh & Asl, 2015).
Weak Social constructionism relies on “brute facts” (which are facts that are so fundamental that they are difficult to explain, such as elementary particles) in addition to “institutional facts” — facts that have been constructed through social interaction (Smith, 2010).
References
Amineh, R. J., & Asl, H. D. (2015). Review of Constructionism and Social Constructionism. Journal of Social Sciences, Literature and Languages, 1(1), 9-16.
Andrews, T. (2012). What is Social Constructionism? Grounded theory review, 11(1).
Averill, J. R. (1985). The social construction of emotion: With special reference to love. In The social construction of the person (pp. 89-109): Springer.
Baert, P., Weinberg, D., & Mottier, V. (2011). Social Constructionism, postmodernism and deconstructionism. The SAGE Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences, SAGE, Los Angeles, CA, 475-486.
Berger Peter, L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The social construction of reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge.
Best, J. (2018). Constructionist studies of social problems: How we got Here, and where we ought to go. SocietàMutamentoPolitica, 9(18), 53-67.
Bo, C. (2015). Social Constructionism of language and meaning. Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 15(43), 87-113.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.
Burr, V. (2015). Social Constructionism: Routledge.
Cattell, R. B. (1946). Description and measurement of personality.
De Saussure, F. (2011). Course in general linguistics: Columbia University Press.
Edwards, D., Ashmore, M., & Potter, J. (1995). Death and furniture: The rhetoric, politics and theology of bottom line arguments against relativism. History of the human sciences, 8(2), 25-49.
Flaskas, C. (1995). Postmodernism, constructionism and the idea of reality: A contribution to the ‘ism’discussions. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 16(3), 143-146.
Foucault, M. (1976). Sorvegliare e punire. Foucault, 21.
Gergen, K. J. (1973). Social psychology as history. Journal of personality and social psychology, 26(2), 309.
Gergen, K. J. (2015). An invitation to social construction (3rd ed.). SAGE Publications.
Hammersley, M. (1992). On feminist methodology. Sociology, 26(2), 187-206.
Hoijer, H. E. (1954). Language in culture; conference on the interrelations of language and other aspects of culture.
Ibarra, P. R., & Adorjan, M. (2018). Social Constructionism. In A. J. Treviño (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Social Problems (Vol. 1, pp. 279-300). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton University Press.
Lutz, C. (1982). The domain of emotion words on Ifaluk. American ethnologist, 9(1), 113-128.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society (Vol. 111): Chicago University of Chicago Press.
Mead, M. (1935). Sex and temperament in three primitive societies. William Morrow.
Rosenhan, D. L. (1973). On being sane in insane places. Science, 179(4070), 250–258.
Schneider, J. (2018). Spector and Kitsuse’s ‘radical’ theory of social problems, forty years on. SocietàMutamentoPolitica, 9(18), 69-79.
Shotter, J. (1995). In conversation: Joint action, shared intentionality and ethics. Theory & Psychology, 5(1), 49-73.
Smith, C. (2011). What is a person?: Rethinking humanity, social life, and the moral good from the person up: University of Chicago Press.
Szasz, T. S. (1960). The myth of mental illness. American Psychologist, 15(2), 113–118.
Vera, H. (2016). Rebuilding a classic: The social construction of reality at 50. Cultural Sociology, 10(1), 3-20.
