Social Constructionism Theory: Definition and Examples

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.

Examples

Social constructionism challenges the assumption that our observations reveal the objective, true nature of the world. Instead, it argues 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. 

A famous experiment tested this directly. It is Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane Places” (1973).

Aim: The study asked a simple question: can staff reliably tell the “sane” from the “insane” once inside a psychiatric hospital?

Method: Eight healthy volunteers, or “pseudopatients,” reported one fake symptom: a voice saying words like “empty” and “thud.” Once admitted, they acted entirely normal. They then tried to be discharged.

Results: Staff admitted almost all of them, mostly with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, for about 19 days on average. The label stuck. Ordinary behaviour, like note-taking, was reinterpreted as a symptom of the diagnosis.

Conclusion: Sane could not be told from insane inside these hospitals. A diagnostic label shaped how staff read everything a patient did next.

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. Instead, 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.

One study tested this directly. It is Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life (1986).

Aim: To examine how scientific facts are actually produced, by studying a working laboratory with an anthropologist’s curiosity about an unfamiliar culture.

Method: The researchers spent time inside an elite neuroendocrinology laboratory. They watched scientists generate data, argue over interpretations, and settle which claims would count as established.

Results: Facts emerged from social, contingent processes: negotiation, persuasion, and the stripping away of qualifying language until a hedged guess hardened into a stated fact. Once a claim stabilised, its social history was erased, and it was treated as something simply discovered.

Conclusion: Even “hard” facts are made, not just found. Objectivity is an outcome of social work.

6. Crime & Deviance

Social construction of crime and deviance is the idea that behaviors are not inherently criminal. Instead, they are labeled deviant by whoever holds power in a given social context.

Deviance is relative. What counts as deviant depends on the norms, values, and interests of the powerful and privileged at a particular time and place.

Meaning is not fixed. Social constructionism holds that the meaning of an act is not an objective quality of the act itself. It is assigned by people through social interaction, and it can shift as public perception shifts.

This has real consequences. Social constructionism can shape whether something counts as a crime at all, how severe it is judged to be, and how much it is feared.

How a society defines and responds to crime is the outcome of complex interactions between different groups.

History shows this clearly. Many acts once treated as crimes are not today, and acts once ignored are now criminalised. Laws against homosexuality, bullying, and drug use have all been created and later reversed as public perception shifted.

7. Language and Discourse

For social constructionists, language is not a neutral tool for describing a pre-existing world. Rather, language creates the world.

We are born into a society where conceptual frameworks already exist. As we learn language, we take on these frameworks to structure our own experience.

This view is close to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, which proposes that the language we use actively shapes our thoughts.

One branch of SC takes this further. Discursive psychology treats attitudes, memories, and emotions as things people do in talk, not private states that talk merely reports. This shifts the focus away from hidden, internal cognitive states.

Instead of treating attitudes, memories, or emotions as private mental objects, discursive psychologists treat them as actions people perform during social exchange.

When we speak, we are building arguments, giving justifications, or assigning blame within a specific cultural context.

There is also a bigger picture. A different, more macro-level tradition looks beyond individual talk to entire discourses. Michel Foucault (1977) called these patterns “discourses”: big, historically entrenched ways of talking about topics like madness, sexuality, and crime.

Tied to institutions such as the clinic and the prison, these discourses actually produce the very subjects they claim only to describe.

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.

Constructionists have tried to answer this. Some soften the claim, retreating to a weaker or more pragmatic version.

Others argue the claim is really about meaning, not about denying that a world exists at all.

Even so, a tension remains. The radicalism that makes constructionism interesting is in tension with the consistency that would make it fully defensible.

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.” In doing so, it denies 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 every cultural belief or practice is just another equally valid “construction,” moral judgement becomes difficult. It becomes hard to condemn actions that are violent, exploitative, or objectively harmful.

This has practical stakes. 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.

Contemporary Research

A major 2019 review then tested that very binary against the evidence.

Aim: Hyde et al. (2019) asked whether the long-standing assumption of a strict, two-category gender binary can still be supported by the evidence.

Method: The review combined evidence from five fields: brain neuroscience, hormone research, studies comparing men and women, transgender and non-binary experience, and child development.

Results: Every field pointed the same way. Brains show no clean split by sex, more a mosaic of overlapping features. Hormone systems also overlap rather than falling into two distinct groups. Men and women turned out to be highly similar on most traits measured.

Transgender and non-binary experiences do not fit the binary either. Even children’s sense that gender is a strict either-or category turns out to be shaped by culture, not something built into the mind.

Conclusion: Hyde and colleagues concluded that the gender binary is a cultural framework, not a biological fact, and recommended that research and clinical practice move beyond binary assumptions.

History

The first sociologist writing in the tradition of social constructionism was Mead (1934), 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. They did so 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

The Social Construction of Reality was first published as a rather esoteric work on the sociology of knowledge. It soon came to define a whole field of “new sociologies” (Vera, 2016).

In short, The Social Construction of Reality argues that humans create and sustain all social phenomena through their own social practices. Berger and Luckmann describe this as a three-part cycle.

First comes externalization.

People pour their activity into the world, turning habits and ideas into shared institutions. Writing down or telling a story about an idea is a simple example.

Next is objectivation.

The human-made idea now takes on a life of its own. It confronts people as an “object” of consciousness, something that feels objectively true rather than something they made.

Finally comes internalization.

The idea is absorbed back into individual consciousness. Future generations take it for granted as an objective truth that already existed in the world they were born into (Burr, 2015).

When this human authorship is forgotten entirely, and a human-made category is mistaken for a fact of nature, Berger and Luckmann call this reification. Undoing reification, by showing that something taken to be simply “there” was in fact built, is much of what constructionist analysis does.

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.

Berger and Luckmann disagree. They argue that “objective” truths have no hidden “essence” that makes them fact.

Facts are not given to us by a cultural surrounding, a social environment, or even biological factors. Instead, the world is constructed through people’s own social practices.

Yet people can still behave as though that constructed world were fixed and pre-defined (Burr, 2015).

Gergen’s Social Psychology as History

In the 1960s and 70s, social psychologists grew concerned that their field was promoting the views of dominant groups (Burr, 2015).

Attention shifted. Researchers moved from lab-based objectivity toward accounts of ordinary people’s lives (Harré & Secord, 1972).

In “Social Psychology as History” (1973), Gergen made a striking argument. Psychology’s methods are scientific, he said, but its theories of social behaviour are not timeless facts. They are reflections of contemporary history.

The natural sciences rest on relatively unchanging principles. Human interaction does not. Gergen argued that it shifts rapidly with time (Gergen, 1973), so social theories both describe what people take to be true and prescribe what they see as desirable.

Wartime psychology shows the pattern.

Social psychology grew during the Second World War partly to serve propaganda: keeping up morale, and encouraging behaviours like eating an unpopular food. These “desirable” behaviours, Gergen argued, shaped the field’s own basis (Burr, 2015).

Social theories, on this view, are symptoms of their moment. They reflect the social, political, and economic conditions in which they were devised, so sociologists can read a theory of behaviour as 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. Instead, postmodernism emphasizes how ways of life 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 treated social problems as conditions that cause real harm to society.

Four years after Gergen’s Social Psychology as History, Spector and Kitsuse challenged this. They extended the concept of social problems using constructionism, in a move sociologists considered radical.

Spector and Kitsuse (1977) made a bold claim. In Constructing Social Problems, they argued that sociologists had altogether failed to build a conception of social problems specific to sociology.

Up to that point, sociologists struggled to say what a social problem even was. What seemed harmful in one society could be treated as normal, or simply taken for granted, in another.

Spector and Kitsuse offered a new definition instead. They defined social problems as “the activities of individuals or groups making assertions of grievances and claims with respect to some putative conditions” (Best, 2018).

The condition itself was not what made something a social problem. What mattered was whether people treated it as one.

Spector went on to use this idea as a guide for 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 shows up as a shift toward individual experience. It replaced attempts to build “grand theories” of human behavior, starting 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 by Edwards, Ashmore, 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 assumes that individuals build their own understandings on top of a set of objective facts. Strong social constructionism goes further, holding that all knowledge is constructed by human society through social interaction (Amineh & Asl, 2015).

Weak social constructionism relies on two kinds of facts. “Brute facts” are basic and hard to explain further, such as elementary particles, while “institutional facts” are facts built through social interaction (Smith, 2010).

Social Constructionism vs. Social Constructivism

Social constructionism is often confused with a similarly named but different idea: constructivism.

Constructivism, in Piaget’s individual form and in Vygotsky’s “social constructivism,” is a theory of how the individual mind builds knowledge. It locates construction inside a person’s own thinking, with social interaction acting as scaffolding for that private process.

Social constructionism relocates the action. Knowledge is not built inside heads at all. It is produced and held between people, in language, discourse, and joint action.

The difference comes down to where construction happens: inside the mind, or in the shared social world.

References

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Vera, H. (2016). Rebuilding a classic: The social construction of reality at 50. Cultural Sociology, 10(1), 3-20.

Further Information

• Andrews, T. (2012). What is social constructionism? Grounded theory review, 11(1).
• Galbin, A. (2014). An introduction to social constructionism. Social Research Reports, 6(26), 82-92.
• Gergen, K. J. (2011). The Self as Social Construction. Psychol Stud (January–March 2011), 56(1), 108-116.