4.2 Social Construction of Reality
Matthew Gougherty and Aimee Samara Krouskop
Race, gender, families, scientific facts, sexuality, nationalism, and reality: What might they have in common? One commonality is that they are all socially constructed. What do sociologists mean when they say something is a social construct? At the most basic level, social constructionism, or the social construction of reality, means “what we take to be the truth about the world importantly depends on the social relationships of which we are a part” (Gergen 2018:7). Humans make meaning collectively. It’s something we are socialized into from birth. In this section, we will explore several traditions that focus on meaning-making and its connection to social reality.
Human Interaction and Institutions
One of the more influential takes on social constructionism emerged from the work of Austrian-American sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. In their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality, they argued that society is created by humans and human interaction, which they call habitualization. Habitualization describes how “any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be … performed again in the future in the same manner and with the same economical effort” (Berger and Luckmann 1966).
Habits allow us to efficiently go about our day-to-day lives. If we had to start from scratch every day, our lives would be weighed down by way too many choices. For example, each of us probably has a morning routine we follow, often without thinking about it too much. This allows us to prepare for our day promptly.
Not only do we construct our society, but we also accept it as it is because others created it before us. Society is, in fact, “habit.” For example, your school exists as a school and not just as a building because you and others agree that it is a school. If your school is older than you are, it was created by the agreement of others before you. In a sense, it exists by consensus, both prior and current. This is an example of the process of institutionalization, the act of implanting a convention or norm into society. Bear in mind that the institution, while socially constructed, is still quite real.
Once meanings are institutionalized, they may appear durable or even “natural.” Through socialization, which we will soon explore in more detail, people learn these institutionalized meanings and become members of their society.
Another way of looking at this concept is through William I. and Dorothy S. Thomas’s notable Thomas theorem which states, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 1928). That is, people’s behavior can be determined by their subjective construction of reality rather than by objective reality. For example, a teenager who is repeatedly given a label—overachiever, player, bum—might live up to the term even though it initially wasn’t a part of their character. Similarly, people believe that race, even though it is socially constructed, is real. As a result, it has real-life consequences, especially when considering access to opportunities.
Constructionism and Cross-Cultural Comparisons
Because we live enmeshed within our own cultures, it can be difficult to see how reality is constructed by the society to which we belong. One way to practice seeing how our immediate society constructs segments of its reality is by applying a constructionist lens to cultures outside of our own. In this section, we’ll look at the concept of beauty across time and culture as an example of social construction.
Researchers have shown that people’s sense of beauty varies across time and culture. In societies around the world, people exaggerate the features of beauty that their culture deems attractive. Ideal characteristics might include neck length, foot size, or lip size. This illustrates the cultural evaluation of beauty and the (often painful) techniques used to achieve the unnaturally extreme forms of beauty.
We don’t have to look extensively to find societies that express beauty differently than Western culture. Figure 4.2 shows a bronze sculpture of a woman named Ilchee, or Moon Woman, who was born in the late 1700s. She belonged to the Chinook Nation in present-day Oregon and Washington and was the daughter of an influential chief. The sculpture is installed along the waterfront in Vancouver, Washington, and was designed by the sculptor Eric Jensen to honor the Chinook people who lived in the area for thousands of years. Jensen represented Ilchee looking toward her family’s ancestral home nearby.
As a child, Ilchee’s caretakers bound her head to create the striking angle of her profile. The elite of some Chinook tribes practiced head binding as a mark of social status as well as to enhance their sense of beauty. Some tribes bound the heads of children regardless of gender, while other tribes focused on flattening the heads of girls (Ruby and Brown 1993, Dingwall 1931).
Another example of the social construction of beauty is evident in the preference for yaeba in Japan. Yaeba refers to a dental pattern in which one tooth, especially one of the upper canines, overlaps another or protrudes from a spot higher in the gum as shown in figure 4.3. To some, this may portray a fang-like appearance. To many in Japan, it is considered a mark of youthfulness and natural beauty. It has recently become a trend for teenage girls to have dental procedures to create or emphasize this look. Others point to it as an expression of the Japanese traditional aesthetic of wabi, which is a consideration of beauty in imperfect things, in simplicity and authenticity (Yaeba Dentistry: The Appeal of Pointy Teeth 2018).
As an example of how people construct beauty varies within a single society, research from Venezuela explores how beauty connects to gender. Taking an innovative approach, anthropologist Marcia Ochoa (2014) devised a research project on “spectacular femininity” in Venezuela by examining two communities: female beauty pageant contestants and transgender sex workers who also hold beauty pageants. Ochoa traces the emergence of the beauty pageant in Venezuela and identifies this ritual competition as a carrier of notions of modernity and nationhood. She explores the competition of young women, or misses, in the Miss Venezuela pageant as well as the local and regional beauty pageants for transformistas, gay Venezuelans who identify as women. The stylized performances of transformistas carry over into their displays on Avenida Libertador in central Caracas, the neighborhood where they conduct their trade as sex workers. To compete in these realms of spectacular femininity, both misses and transformistas undergo painful surgical procedures to make their bodies conform to an exaggerated ideal of Eurocentric femininity.
Ochoa’s work is pathbreaking in its ability to bring together concepts often explored separately or held in opposition: heterosexuality and non-heterosexuality, gender and sexuality, and cisgender and transgender identities (cisgender describes gender identity constructed on the sex assigned at birth). By juxtaposing misses and transformistas, she shows how these seemingly disparate concepts are threaded together in the complex web of Venezuelan culture.
How do other cultures see the standards of beauty in the United States? Tanning to achieve the ultimate sun-kissed look is considered an odd practice by women from cultures that prioritize fair and porcelain-like skin. Similarly, the U.S. preference for very straight and very white teeth is sometimes seen as obsessive and overly uniform (Barford 2022). Professor Jimmy Steele of the School of Dental Science at Newcastle University finds that,
U.S. teeth are sometimes whiter than it is physically possible to get in nature—there is a new reality out there. The most extreme tooth bleaching is terrifying, it looks like it’s painted with gloss paint and has altered what people perceive as normal. (Barford 2022)
What are other ways societies outside of the United States might find the U.S. social construction of beauty peculiar? How else might we identify beauty as a social construct?
Activity: Gender and the Social Construction of Beauty
Let’s explore gender and the social construction of beauty. In 1949, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published the book, The Second Sex. In it, she introduced the idea that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” A woman becomes one through men’s construction of femininity and the feminine ideal. Both constructs, she explained, serve men’s economic and physical ends. Beauty itself has been determined by men, Beauvoir would say. As a result, society emphasizes women’s bodies and prioritizes them being on display. Furthermore, women are socialized into accepting a more passive role in life, except for actively tending to their appearance.
In this two-minute video, pay attention to the ways Beauvoir and the narrator describe how this social construct shows up in real life (figure 4.4). That is, what behaviors do they point out are related to the social construction of beauty?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT6wjgssVK4
Beauvoir held an activist stance, encouraging women to reject male expectations of beauty and femininity. She asserted that women shouldn’t have to act, engage, or present themselves to please men. She also suggested that resistance to male stereotypes of beauty can mean greater equality.
Beauvoir criticized Western society’s patriarchy, a system in which men hold power. She advocated for the destruction of patriarchal institutions and was critical of the Western practice of the traditional nuclear family. Living in France, this was the society in which she lived and evaluated.
Questions to consider:
- How do other societies construct beauty and femininity?
- Do societies that are not patriarchal construct beauty differently?
Symbolic Interactionism
Let’s revisit symbolic interactionism, a micro-level theory, that we first discussed in Chapter 2 and think about how it could be applied to beauty standards. As Herbert Blumer (1969:2) stated, symbolic interactionism was based on the following premises:
- Humans act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things.
- The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and society.
- These meanings are handled, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters.
Interactionists are concerned with how meanings are constructed through interactions with others. We attach meanings to situations, roles, relationships, and most things in our lives whenever we encounter them. For a symbolic interaction to occur, the people you are interacting with must share and agree upon these meanings to some extent.
If we were to take beauty standards as our object of study from a symbolic interactionist perspective, we would most likely start by trying to understand how people interpret beauty and how they act based on it. We might ask: how do people define beauty? What assumptions do people make about beauty? The interactionist perspective would also help us understand how people learn what beauty is from other people and institutions, such as the media. A key interactionist point would be that beauty standards are continually changing, with each interaction concerning the meanings of beauty providing an opportunity for it to change.
Activity: Ethnomethodology and TikTok
Ethnomethodology is another micro-level theory that can help explain our daily interactions. In simple terms, ethnomethodology is the study of everyday folk methods and how we go about ordering our day-to-day lives. Often, how we organize our lives is taken for granted and can be hard to explain. Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, developed an approach to showing the hidden rules for how we live our lives. He called these breaching experiments. In breaching experiments, the experimenter goes out in public and breaks everyday unspoken rules and expectations. The breaking of unspoken rules helps reveal people’s expectations. The experiment also shows how people will repair interactions once an unspoken rule has been broken. As an example, say you and your classmates started dancing Laxed (Siren Beat) [Streaming Video – TikTok] through the library. Questions to consider:
- How do you think people in the library would respond? What might be the consequences of violating the unspoken rules of the library?
- What norms related to libraries might this impromptu dance party reveal?
Licenses and Attributions for Social Construction of Reality
Open Content, Original
“Constructionism and Cross-Cultural Comparisons” and “Activity: Gender and the Social Construction of Beauty” by Aimee Samara Krouskop are licensed under CC BY 4.0.
All other content in “Social Construction of Reality”, “Human Interactions and Institutions”, “Symbolic Interactionism” and “Activity: Ethnomethodology and TikTok” sections by Matthew Gougherty licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Open Content, Shared Previously
First, third, and fifth paragraphs in “Human Interaction and Institutions” are modified from “4.3 Social Construction of Reality” by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Introduction to Sociology 3e, OpenStax, which is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Modifications include adding the first sentence in the first paragraph, information about Dorothy Thomas’ contribution, and the race example.
Paragraphs on transformistas in “Constructionism and Cross-Cultural Comparisons” are from “12.4 Sexuality and Queer Anthropology” by Jennifer Hasty, David G. Lewis, and Marjorie M. Snipes in Introduction to Anthropology, OpenStax, which is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Figure 4.2. “Ilchee, Moon Girl” by Minh-Kiet Callies is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Figure 4.3. “Masora hino 20161112” by Bject is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
All Rights Reserved Content
Figure 4.4. “Feminine Beauty: A Social Construct?” is shared under the Standard YouTube License.
a category of identity that ascribes social, cultural, and political meaning and consequence to physical characteristics.
a term that refers to the behaviors, personal traits, and social positions that society attributes to being female or male
the sexual feelings, thoughts, attractions and behaviors individuals have toward other people.
a framework that explains how the meaning of something is dependent on our social relationships.
a group of people who live in a defined geographic area, interact with one another, and share a common culture.
repeated actions that form a pattern.
the implantation of a convention or norm into society.
the process wherein people come to understand societal norms and expectations, to accept society’s beliefs, and to be aware of societal values.
the theory that if people define something as real, it will have real consequences.
a person whose sex assigned at birth and gender identity are not necessarily the same.
physical or physiological differences between males and females, including both primary sex characteristics (the reproductive system) and secondary characteristics such as height and muscularity.
people who identify with the sex they were assigned at birth are often referred to as cisgender, utilizing the Latin prefix cis-, which means “on the same side.”
a deeply held internal perception of one’s gender.
an environment where characteristics associated with men and masculinity have more power and authority.
a micro-level theory that emphasizes the importance of meanings and interactions in social life.
a statement that proposes to describe and explain why facts or other social phenomena are related to each other based on observed patterns.
patterns of behavior that are representative of a person’s social status.
the study of everyday folk methods, how we go about ordering our day-to-day lives.
the testing of a hypothesis under controlled conditions.
the social expectations of how to behave in a situation.