Social Construction of Reality

The Construction of Reality

Social constructionism holds that the meaning of acts, behaviors, and events is not an objective quality of those phenomena but is assigned to them through social interactions.

In this view, meaning is socially defined and organized and thus subject to social change.

Berger and Luckmann argue that society (and your everyday reality) is a human product that acts back on its producers, making us, in turn, a social product.

This entire cycle is governed by a three-step process:

Step	Core Concept	Simple Definition	Key Outcome
1. Externalization	Society is a Human Product	We, the people, create and introduce cultural products, ideas, and habits into the world.	The creation of social and physical products from human activity.
2. Objectivation	Society is an Objective Reality	Once created, these products “harden” and are treated as if they are separate, external facts of nature or the universe.	The experience of these products as an undeniable, pre-existing reality.
3. Internalization	Man is a Social Product	New members of society (like children) learn this objective reality and accept it as unquestionable truth, making it their own subjective consciousness.	The assimilation of objective reality back into the individual’s mind through socialization.

Intellectual Origins

Berger and Luckmann did not invent this idea from nothing. Their book’s subtitle, A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, names the older field it renews.

Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge

The sociology of knowledge studies how a person’s social position shapes what their group takes to be true. The Hungarian-German sociologist Karl Mannheim gave the field its clearest early statement (Mannheim, 1936). His influence spread widely.

Mannheim argued that thought is always tied to the thinker’s social and historical position. Competing ideologies are not simply true or false in the abstract. They reflect the standpoint of the group that holds them.

Berger and Luckmann took this further, in what became their central move. They argued the same social relativity applies well beyond contested political ideas.

It applies to ordinary, taken-for-granted reality too: the “obvious” facts that ordinary people never think to question, from how a classroom works to what money is for.

Schutz and Phenomenology

The theory’s other, more decisive source is phenomenology, the philosophical tradition founded by Edmund Husserl, which treats lived, first-person experience as its starting point.

The Austrian philosopher Alfred Schutz brought this tradition into sociology (Schutz, 1932/1967). His influence was immense. Schutz studied how private, subjective experience still gives rise to a shared social world that people simply experience as real, day to day.

This gave Berger and Luckmann much of their vocabulary. It includes the unquestioned natural attitude of daily life, and the routine typifications (“a customer”, “a classroom”) that let people recognise familiar situations at a glance.

Both Berger and Luckmann studied under Schutz in New York. Their book, in large part, marries Schutz’s account of everyday meaning-making to Mannheim’s claim that knowledge is socially situated.

1. Externalization (We Create It)

Externalization means humans actively produce their social world through behaviour, communication, and cooperation.

Externalization is the continuous process where human beings “pour out” their ideas, beliefs, and activities into the world.

Why do humans externalize?

Because humans are biologically incomplete. We don’t have many instincts telling us what to do. So we must:

• invent routines

• create customs

• build tools

• form shared meanings

This is what Berger & Luckmann call an “anthropological necessity”: humans must create structure because nature doesn’t provide enough of it.

Key feature: Habitualization

When people repeat an action over and over, it becomes a habit.

Examples:

• Sitting in the same seat every lecture

• Greeting people with “Hi, how are you?”

• Always eating lunch around noon

Habits reduce decision-making. They free up mental energy.

From habits to shared habits

When multiple people share the same habit and expect each other to follow it, it becomes a social pattern.

Examples:

• Lining up in queues

• Driving on the left/right side of the road

• Using a handshake as a greeting

These are not laws of nature; they are human creations.

2. Objectivation: When Human Creations Start to Feel Real

Objectivation (sometimes objectification) happens when the things we created become:

• stable

• widely shared

• taken seriously

• experienced as external facts

They begin to feel separate from the individuals who created them.

How this happens: From shared habits to institutions

When a pattern becomes widely accepted and passed to new generations, it becomes aninstitution.

Examples of institutions:

• Marriage

• Money

• Schooling

• The legal system

• Gender roles

• Universities

• Religion

Institutions feel solid, reliable, and beyond individual choice.

Objective Facticity

This is Berger & Luckmann’s term for the idea that institutions seem as real as physical facts.

For a child:

• School feels as “natural” as gravity.

• “2+2=4” seems like an eternal truth.

• “Boys wear this / girls wear that” seems self-evident.

Even though all of these are human inventions.

Knowledge becomes external too

People share what Berger & Luckmann call recipe knowledge – simple, taken-for-granted understandings.

Examples:

• “Everyone knows how a classroom works.”

• “Everyone knows what money is for.”

• “Everyone knows good manners.”

This shared knowledge helps maintain society but also hides the fact that we invented all of it.

Risk: Reification

Reification means forgetting that society is human-made. We begin to think social rules are:

• natural

• permanent

• inevitable

For example:

• “Boys will be boys.”

• “That’s just how the system works.”

• “Marriage has always been like this.”

Reification makes us believe our own creations are forces acting upon us, instead of things we can change.

This is one of Berger and Luckmann’s biggest warnings.

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3. Internalization: How Society Gets Inside Us

Internalization is when people come to accept the world as reality, taking in its norms, rules, and meanings.

This happens through socialization: the lifelong process of learning how to be a member of society.

Primary internalization (childhood)

This stage is incredibly powerful because children:

• don’t question what they’re taught

• see the world as unchangeable

• absorb rules automatically

Children internalize:

• language

• family roles

• moral values

• gender expectations

• cultural norms

All of these feel natural because children had no earlier reality to compare them with.

Secondary internalization (later life)

As adults, we continue learning:

• professional roles (doctor, teacher, builder)

• community norms

• organizational rules

• subcultural knowledge

But these rarely have the power of childhood learning.

Internalization forms identity

Through internalization, people don’t just learn roles—they become the roles.

Examples:

• A child learns they are a “girl” or “boy” by internalizing what society says those categories mean.

• A student internalizes what it means to be “a good student.”

• A religious member internalizes the beliefs of their faith.

Eventually, the individual’s sense of self and their society’s rules line up.

This is how society “gets inside” the person.

Examples

1. Is gender a social construct, and how is it different from biological sex?

Gender is a social construct because it develops through the same three-step cycle that shapes all social reality.

1. Externalization: People create behaviours, routines, and meanings about how “men” and “women” should act—such as dress codes, emotional expectations, or family roles.
2. Objectivation: Over time, these patterns solidify into stable institutions (e.g., gender roles, norms, and rules) that feel real, natural, and external, even though humans created them.
3. Internalization: New generations learn these gender norms as unquestioned facts, shaping their identity and behaviour.

   These internalized beliefs then guide how people act, reinforcing gender expectations and restarting the cycle—making gender seem natural, even though it is socially produced and maintained.

One study puts this to the test.

Aim: West and Zimmerman (1987) set out to show that gender is not a fixed trait people simply have, but something people actively do, moment to moment, in social situations.

Method: A theoretical paper drawing on real interaction studies, including a transgender woman’s socialisation into “acceptable” femininity. It distinguishes sex (a biological classification), sex category (an assigned social identity), and gender (the ongoing work of managing conduct to fit that category).

The finding was striking.

Results: People are held accountable to gender norms in almost every social situation, through posture, speech, and dress, whether or not they are trying to conform.

Conclusion: Gender is a social accomplishment achieved through interaction, not a role a person simply occupies, and the paper is one of the most cited in the sociology of gender.

2. How is the concept of money a social construct?

Money is a social construct because it has value only because people collectively agree it does.

1. Externalization: People first create behaviours and meanings around exchange, agreeing that certain objects or symbols (shells, coins, paper notes, digital numbers) can stand in for goods, labour, or debt. Nothing in these objects is naturally valuable; people assign value to them.
2. Objectivation: Over time, these exchange practices become stable institutions such as banking systems, currencies, interest rates, and financial laws.

   These institutions feel real, permanent, and external to us, even though people built them. Money begins to appear as an objective, unquestionable fact of life.

3. Internalization: New generations learn how money “works” as if it were a natural feature of the world, believing that money has inherent value and that economic rules are simply “the way things are.”

   These internalized beliefs then guide everyday behaviour (saving, spending, working), which reinforces the institution of money and restarts the cycle.

   In this way, money feels natural and inevitable, even though it is fundamentally a human-created system of shared meaning.

Without shared belief and trust, money would instantly lose its power.

One study shows this in detail.

Aim: Zelizer (1994) set out to challenge the idea that money is one single, interchangeable medium of exchange, by showing how people treat different sums of money as qualitatively different.

Method: A historical study of American households from the late 1800s to the 1900s, drawing on household-budgeting records, court cases, and charity files to trace how families actually handled money.

The pattern held everywhere.

Results: Households and courts routinely earmarked money into separate categories, such as a housewife’s allowance or a child’s savings, each governed by different rules about who could spend it.

Conclusion: Money is not just built once, at the level of currency and banks. Families and communities keep re-earmarking it, giving it new social meaning at a much smaller scale.

3. How do different societies construct the meaning of family?

Different societies construct the meaning of family through the same three-step process that shapes all social reality.

1. Externalization: People create behaviours, routines, and meanings about who counts as family, what roles family members should play, and how families should live together.

   Some societies emphasise large extended families; others focus on small nuclear units; others recognise chosen family or multi-parent households.

2. Objectivation: Over time, these patterns solidify into institutions—marriage laws, inheritance rules, parenting norms, living arrangements, and cultural expectations.

   These institutions feel natural and external, as if there is one “proper” way to form a family, even though societies differ widely.

3. Internalization: New generations learn their society’s version of family as an unquestioned fact—believing that “this is what a real family looks like.” This shapes identity, relationships, and expectations about love, care, and responsibility.

   These internalized beliefs guide behaviour (who people marry, live with, or care for), reinforcing and reproducing the society’s particular meaning of family and restarting the cycle.

Implications

1. How does understanding social construction help us address social inequality?

Seeing inequality as constructed shifts the focus from individual blame to structural causes.

Poverty, racism, and gender inequality are not the result of personal failings but of unequal access to resources, discrimination, and cultural expectations.

Recognising this helps challenge harmful ideologies and what conflict theorists call false consciousness – the belief that the system is fair.

Once we see inequality as built into society rather than built into individuals, it becomes clear where change should happen: in institutions, cultural norms, and power structures.

Changing Institutions

• Legal system: often protects wealth and corporate interests; reform requires limiting how the powerful shape laws.

• Education: standardized tests and “tracking” can reinforce class and racial inequality; recognising these as social constructions supports calls for equity-focused reform.

• Gender norms: if gender roles are socially created, we can challenge stereotypes through parenting, media representation, and education.

 Building Solidarity and New Ways of Seeing

• Feminist theory shows that gender inequality is a system, not a personal issue.
• Intersectionality adds that race, class, gender and more overlap to create unique experiences of disadvantage.
• Symbolic interactionism shows how inequality is maintained in everyday interactions—how we “do gender,” how we talk about class, how stereotypes are reinforced.

Small changes in everyday behaviour can snowball into larger cultural change.

Public Sociology: Bringing Knowledge to Society

Public sociology aims to take these insights into the real world—shaping public debates, policy decisions, activism, and community interventions.

By showing that inequality is socially constructed, sociologists help society focus on root causes, not symptoms.

2. What is the role of media and technology in reinforcing social reality?

Media and technology play a huge role in shaping what we think of as “real.”

They influence how we learn, what we believe, how we see ourselves, and how society is organized.

Different sociological perspectives look at this role in different ways. 

Functionalist Perspective: Media Helps Keep Society Running Smoothly

Functionalists focus on how media and technology help society stay stable and connected.

Key ideas:

• Teaching norms and values: TV, movies, news, and online platforms teach us what is considered normal or acceptable in society. This process continues throughout our lives.

• Creating shared culture: Media helps people feel connected by exposing them to common stories, ideas, and values. For example, online platforms can help new immigrants learn about and adapt to mainstream culture.

• Providing role models: Celebrities, influencers, and fictional characters give people examples of behaviors to copy.

• Manifest vs. latent functions:

  • Manifest functions: the obvious purposes (entertainment, information).

  • Latent functions: hidden effects (bringing people together, helping integrate groups into society).

• Recognizing dysfunctions: Media can sometimes cause problems—like overwhelming people with information (so they stop acting on what they know) or exposing people to violent content.

Conflict Perspective: Media as a Tool for Power and Control

Conflict theorists see media and technology as tools used by powerful groups to maintain control and protect their interests.

Key ideas:

• Media as an ideological system: Media supports the dominant economic and political system—often reinforcing the interests of wealthy or powerful groups.

• Gatekeeping: A small number of people and institutions decide what information gets shared publicly. This shapes how we understand the world.

• Hegemony: Dominant groups use media to present their worldview as “normal,” making alternative perspectives seem less legitimate.

• Biased or selective reporting: The media may highlight stories that benefit those in power while downplaying or distorting information that challenges them.

• Reinforcing inequality: Coverage often relies on stereotypes or negative portrayals of marginalized groups, contributing to prejudice and social inequality.

Symbolic Interactionist Perspective: Media Shapes Meaning in Everyday Life

Symbolic interactionists look at how media affects people on a personal, everyday level and helps shape our sense of reality.

Key ideas:

• Shared symbols and meanings: Media creates symbols—like brands, memes, images, and catchphrases—that help people understand and communicate about the world.

• Media framing: How a story is presented (the focus, the tone, the wording) affects how people interpret events.

• Reference groups: People may compare themselves to the influencers, characters, or communities they see online. For some, online personalities can feel as important as real-life relationships.

• Identity and self-presentation: Social media allows people to choose what parts of themselves they show others, shaping their identity and how others see them.

• Learning gender roles: Media often reinforces beliefs about “masculine” and “feminine” behavior through repeated images and messages.

Critical Evaluation

1. “Doesn’t this deny objective reality?”

This is the most common criticism.

What critics say

Critics argue that SCR sometimes sounds like it claims nothing is objectively real—that illnesses, problems, or dangers only exist because society labels them that way.

For example:
Even if a society denied that cancer is real, cancer would still kill people. So critics think strong forms of constructionism go too far by implying that everything is “just a social label.”

How SCR scholars respond

The original theorists say this is a misunderstanding.

They argue:

• They are not saying nothing is real.

• Instead, they say that social processes give meaning to things and make those meanings feel “real” and taken for granted.

• They acknowledge that society has objective facticity — things that exist whether we like them or not.
  (For example, you cannot simply “wish away” laws, norms, or institutions.)

Their real point is this:

Social facts feel objective, but that objectivity is human-made.

The problem arises when people forget this and start treating social creations as if they were natural, permanent, or inevitable. This mistake is called reification.

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2. Too focused on small interactions; ignores bigger social forces

What critics say

SCR and symbolic interactionism pay close attention to micro-level interactions — everyday conversations, meanings, and symbols. Critics argue this makes the approach:

• Too narrow, because it pays less attention to large-scale issues.

• Weak on social inequality, because it doesn’t adequately address racism, sexism, class inequality, or political power.

• Not generalisable, because it focuses on specific small situations rather than bigger patterns.

For example, critics say that studying how a patient interprets illness ignores how poverty, racism, or health policy shape who gets sick in the first place.

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3. Methodological and epistemological problems

a. Hard to remain objective

Because SCR encourages researchers to understand people’s subjective viewpoints, critics argue that the approach:

• Makes it difficult for sociologists to stay objective

• Allows the researcher’s own perspective to influence the results

b. Lack of quantitative data

Critics (especially positivists) say the approach often uses:

• Very small samples

• Unstructured interviews

• Participant observation

• Few or no statistics

This makes generalisation difficult.

c. Over-focus on conscious meaning

Symbolic interactionism tends to study rational and conscious decisions. Critics say this ignores:

• Unconscious motives

• Emotional or irrational behaviour

d. Vague or untestable concepts

Related theories (poststructuralism, differential association, etc.) are sometimes criticised for using unclear concepts that are hard to measure or test.

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4. Weak at explaining deviance, crime, and real-world consequences

a. Doesn’t explain the causes of deviance

Labeling theory (linked to SCR) focuses on how acts become labelled as deviant, but not why people commit them in the first place.

b. Ignores the real harm caused by crime

Left Realists argue that some constructivist or Marxist perspectives treat crime statistics as nothing more than social constructions.

Critics say this overlooks the real, damaging effects of violence, robbery, and everyday crime in poorer neighbourhoods.

c. Overly deterministic

Labeling theory is sometimes accused of implying that:

• Once someone is labeled deviant, their future is almost predetermined

• Individuals have little free will or personal agency

d. Overemphasises freedom (postmodernism)

Some postmodern or constructionist ideas imply that people are free to choose any identity they want.

Critics point out that poverty, gender, and social class limit the lifestyles people can realistically adopt.

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5. How does the theory compare to symbolic interactionism?

The Social Construction of Reality (SCR) and Symbolic Interactionism (SI) are closely connected theories.

SCR builds on the ideas of SI, but expands them into a much larger picture of how whole societies are created and maintained.

Think of it this way:

• Symbolic Interactionism = explains how individuals create meaning in everyday interactions.

• Social Construction of Reality = explains how those small interactions build up to create the entire social world.

Feature	Symbolic Interactionism (SI)	Social Construction of Reality (SCR)
Focus	Micro (small-scale interactions)	Micro + Macro (interactions + institutions)
Goal	Understand how people create meaning	Understand how meaning becomes social structure
View of Society	Society = ongoing interactions	Society = an objective reality people create and then internalize
Weakness	Too narrow; ignores big social forces	Addresses that weakness by explaining macro-level structures

6. How does the theory compare to Durkheim’s theory of social facts?

The most direct historical rival is Émile Durkheim, founder of structural functionalism. Durkheim treated institutions and “social facts” as external, constraining realities. He said these facts exist before, and independently of, any individual (Durkheim, 1982).

Berger and Luckmann agree that institutions really do feel external and constraining. That is exactly what their idea of objective facticity captures.

They disagree on what causes that feeling. For Durkheim, a social fact’s externality is real and mind-independent. For Berger and Luckmann, people made that externality themselves.

It keeps being remade through the same externalization-objectivation cycle that first created it. So it can, in principle, always be undone through deliberate deconstruction. This is exactly the fault line the “doesn’t this deny objective reality” criticism above runs along.

7. What does critical realism say about social constructionism?

A later, more hostile critique comes from critical realism, developed by the philosopher Roy Bhaskar. Bhaskar argues that constructionism commits an epistemic fallacy (Bhaskar, 1975).

This fallacy collapses questions about what exists into questions about what can be known. It treats nothing as real unless some group already believes it.

Applied to Berger and Luckmann, the charge runs deep. Their theory is built entirely around externalization, objectivation, and internalization, all of them processes of knowing and believing. Critics worry this quietly assumes social reality just is whatever a society currently takes it to be.

The charge is serious.

Berger and Luckmann’s own idea of objective facticity is a partial answer. Institutions really do constrain behaviour independently of any one person’s beliefs, once they are objectivated.

Contemporary Research

Berger and Luckmann wrote from theory and example, not fieldwork of their own. Two recent lines of research test how the three-step model holds up today.

Living Outside the Gender Binary

Aim: Fiani and Han (2019) set out to document, in people’s own words, how transgender and gender non-conforming adults actually experience and navigate their gender identity.

Method: A qualitative study based on interviews with 15 transgender and gender non-conforming adults, comparing binary and non-binary participants’ experiences.

Results: Social support and everyday interaction shaped participants’ sense of identity more than physical transition or activism did. Non-binary participants also described feeling invisible, even within transgender communities.

Conclusion: A non-binary identity is not a smaller version of a binary transgender experience. It is its own, distinctly patterned experience that earlier research had largely missed.

A Sharper Theory of How Categories Stick

The philosopher Ásta (2018) developed a theory called conferralism, which explains more precisely how a category like sex, gender, or race comes to attach to a person.

On this account, a property is conferred on someone when other people, who have the standing to do so, treat some visible feature as grounds for the label. The label can be mistaken, challenged, or reversed.

Read together, the two studies extend Berger and Luckmann’s own theory rather than just confirming it. One documents lived experience under an objectivated category; the other sharpens the mechanism by which that category gets assigned.

FAQs

What is the difference between the social construction of reality vs. looking glass self?

The looking-glass self is a sociological theory that says a person’s self-image is based on how they think others see them.

The social construction of reality builds on this idea. It says a person’s whole sense of reality, not just their self-image, is shaped by interaction with others.

References

Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (2016). The social construction of reality. In Social Theory Re-Wired (pp. 110-122). Routledge.

Burr, V. (2015).  Social constructionism. Routledge.

Edley, N. (2001). Unravelling social constructionism.  Theory & Psychology,  11 (3), 433-441.

Goffman, E. (2004). Belief in part one is playing (pp. 59-63). Routledge.

Leeds-Hurwitz, W., Braithwaite, D. O., & Baxter, L. A. (2006). Social theories: Social constructionism and symbolic interactionism. Engaging theories in family communication: Multiple perspectives, 229-242.

Miller, G. and Nowacek, D. (2022). Social Construction of Reality. In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, G. Ritzer (Ed.). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405165518.wbeos1232

Merton, R. (1947). MERTON, ROBERT. Wright Mills, August, 1, 1947.

Merton, R. K. (1957). The role-set: Problems in sociological theory. The British Journal of Sociology, 8( 2), 106-120.

Miller, G., & Nowacek, D. (2018). The Social Construction of Reality.

Myers, M. D. (2008). Qualitative Research in Business & Management. SAGE Publications.

Thomas, W. I., & Thomas, D. S. (1928). The methodology of behavior study. The child in America: Behavior problems and programs, 553-576.