Social Constructions of Reality

How do sociologists explain large scale social structures starting from the point of view of micro-scale social interactions? In 1966 sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote The Social Construction of Reality. They asked, how do institutions actually arise? If an institution is essentially just a collection of interacting individuals,  how do they come to appear as “given, unalterable or self evident”?  Berger and Luckmann argued that the objective reality of society, (i.e.,Durkheim’s “social facts”), is created by humans and human interaction, through a process of habitualization. If society and its institutions seem to be objective social facts that exist externally to individuals, they become that way through an ongoing process of creation and forgetting. 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). Not only do people construct their own society, but they accept it as it is because others have created it before them. Society is, in fact, “habit.”

Berger and Luckmann (1966) describe three separate processes through which “society” is accomplished: externalization, objectivation and internalization. Firstly, in externalization, human activity and labour create products that are separate from the creator. This is evident in commodity production when cars and other things are produced and then sold on the market, but it also applies to the production of social agreements, job descriptions, social roles, technical knowledge, managerial decisions, memoranda, rules, systems and so on. These are created by individuals through various social processes but then stand independently from them. Secondly, in objectivation, products of human creation obtain the character of objects which act back on the creators. Once a rule is established for example, it acts upon people, as if through its own agency, and constrains the lives of the people it rules. Thirdly, in internalization, the objective world is “retrojected” into consciousness through socialization. People internalize the rules and accept them as the guiding principles of their behaviour.

For example, a school exists as a school and not just as a building because students, teachers and others agree that it is a school. They create the school and formulate expectations about the type of activities and relationships that will go on there. They interact “in school” in regular patterns according to this construct. If the school is older than the student, it was created by the agreement of others before the student enrolled. In a sense, it continues to exist by consensus and habit, both prior and current. This is an example of the process of institutionalization, the act of implanting a convention or norm into society that is repeated through time. Bear in mind that the institution, while socially constructed, is still quite real.

Another way of looking at this concept of socially constructed reality is through W. I. 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 behaviour can be determined by their mutual definition of the situation  rather than by any independent or “objective” criterion of reality. Once the definition of the situation is established, people act according to it. It is real in its consequences. In the school for example, there is an agreed upon rule of etiquette between students and teachers, which could have been formulated otherwise. This definition of the situation is inter-subjective in the sense that it is based on a subjective understanding shared mutually by multiple individuals,  but it is also real in its consequences. If a student or teacher steps out of line at school there are sanctions of varying severity. Thomas states therefore that moral codes and social norms are created by “successive definitions of the situation.”

Howard Becker (1963) elaborates on this idea in his theory of labeling and deviance (see Chapter 8. Deviance, Crime, and Social Control). If someone violates a particular rule it does not mean they are deviant in other respects. But being labelled “deviant” by authorities (police, parents, teachers, etc.) initiates a chain of consequences for the individual, which makes it difficult for them to participate in conventional groups and activities (like holding a job or going to school) with the “normals.” The individual is also subject to common popular diagnoses about why they have “gone” that way — e.g., “he is a bad seed,” “she is weak willed,” etc. — which furthers the perception that they are an outsider. These factors in turn make it more difficult for the individual to conform to other rules which they had no intention of violating. The individual is placed in an increasingly untenable position in which it becomes increasingly likely they will need to resort to deceit and rule violation. “Treating a person as though he [or she] were generally rather than specifically deviant produces a self-fulfilling prophecy” (Becker, 1963). A teenager who is repeatedly given a label — overachiever, player, bum, delinquent — might live up to the term, even though it was not initially part of their character.

This concept is further refined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in his definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Merton explains that with a self-fulfilling prophecy, even a false idea can become true if it is acted on. Merton gives the example of a “bank run.” Say for some reason, a number of people falsely fear that their bank is soon to be bankrupt. Because of this false notion, people run to their bank and demand all their cash at once. As banks rarely, if ever, have that much money on hand, the bank does indeed run out of money, fulfilling the customers’ prophecy. Similarly, the role of “investor confidence” was prominent in the promotion of unsupportable investments that lead up to the financial crisis of 2008. Investor confidence is another social construct, which is “real in its consequences” but based on a fiction.

Social reality is constructed by an idea which people follow. The idea does not need to be correct to be followed. This is a key component in people acting on conspiracy theories. A conspiracy theory is an explanation of events based on the belief that a group of actors have colluded in secret to reach malevolent goals (Bale, 2007). There have been actual conspiracies at the highest level of politics and commerce, the Watergate scandal of the 1970s and the 1950-1960s collusion between American automakers to prevent installation of catalytic converters and other technologies to reduce pollution are examples. More frequently, conspiracies about the “deep state” or international agencies seeking world domination are fabricated but consequential when people believe them. The most tragic example of this was the fake 19th century “Protocols of Zion”  text, which German Anti-Semites and eventually the German Nazi Party claimed was evidence of an international Jewish conspiracy for global domination.

A more contemporary cycle of conspiracy began with the QAnon conspiracy “Pizzagate.” This started in 2016 with the Wikileaks theft and release of emails from John Podesta, the then chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 U.S. presidential campaign (LeFrance, 2020). Podestra had emailed with the owner of Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC., about fundraising events. The anonymous “Q” on the 4chan imageboard website started the rumour that these emails were evidence of secret, ritualistic child abuse by various Democratic party and celebrity elites taking place in the basement of the restaurant. The restaurant does not have a basement and the rumours were completely fabricated, but an ordinary citizen, Edgar Maddison Welch, believed them, armed himself with weapons, entered the restaurant and threatened staff and customers until he realized his mistake. “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” he admitted after being taken into custody by police (LeFrance, 2020). The conspiracy was false, some might say completely ludicrous, but it was real in its consequences. People periodically continue to gather outside the restaurant to protest the non-existent underground pedophilia ring (Schaffer, 2021). In Canada, there were approximately 100,000 members of Canadian QAnon Facebook groups in 2020 (Remski, 2021).