Social Construction of Reality

INTRODUCTION
People are social beings: they seek out others for conversation, support, love, communication, and even for contention. They adapt, conform, criticize, change and reflect and project the values and norms that flow in between and around them, from person to person, society to society, culture to culture. As a result, people and their identities are constantly undergoing revision, which most call natural development or growth—but “we forget that these things that appear natural were actually socially constructed” as DeLamater, Myers and Collett (2015:6) put it. This paper will explain how people are socially constructed, both inside and out—i.e., in the way they construct their internal identities to the way they behave outwardly, dress, and either conform to societal expectations and norms or reject them by conforming to a subculture or “non-conformist” social group. It the end, the same phenomenon is occurring: the social construction of human identities and norms.
THE SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED HUMAN BEING
So much of the way in which people behave, think of themselves, and imagine within themselves what is important is an effect of the world around them that it has become a staple of sociological thought that media, peers and groups are the primary input providers when it comes to the construction of one’s identity. For example, Schweingruber, Anahita and Berns (2004) show that people who intend to “pop the question”—i.e., ask someone to marry them—will do so in a way that generally conforms to the societal standards and expectations of their culture and society. It is a ritual that people adhere to because there is the sense that they must perform this part so as to make others happy. They perceive that they are being judged on how they go about the proposal and they want to be judged acceptable. They construct their performance based upon their understanding of the part and what is anticipated. They socially construct themselves to fit into that part—and so they become the character (person) they think they are supposed to be that falls in line with the impressions of the part (the character) required for the proposal.
By extension, it can be seen that all human behavior is predicated on the idea that what one does is in conformity with some idea inside the person’s mind of what one should be. If one conforms to conventional norms, one does so because this is the part that he believes he should play. If one rejects those same norms and embraces standards other than the conventional ones, the same justification applies. Justification and excuses are what people use—accounts is what Scott and Lyman (1968) call them—to explain their behavior, choices, actions, and identity. The give accounts to themselves and to others to rationalize their social construction of identity.
Life is not so simple that accounts can be given flawlessly, which is why Festinger developed his cognitive dissonance theory, which essentially states that “people try to make sense out of their environment and their behavior—and thus try to lead lives that are (at least in their own minds) sensible and meaningful” (Aronson 1999:220). The social construction of the human identity is based on people’s need to make sense of their own lives, and what is known as development of human life is really the reaction that people have to their own cognitive dissonance. They want consistency, but when consistency does not happen they must change something to resolve the dissonance that they experience. So they change a perception, change themselves, or change the reality by influencing it in some way.
The social reality of human life is that there is a constant two-way interaction among people who are continuously engaged in various stages of dealing with cognitive dissonance. Because people grow up under all manner of influences, they have all manner of beliefs, expectations and attitudes within their own minds, guiding their own wills and adding to their own impulses. These can be as simple as a proverb picked up from one’s grandmother that creates an expectation within one about how one should live or behave (Epstein 1997). People form expectations for themselves and live their lives by attempting to conform to these expectations. They socially construct their identities based on inputs they have received from society. Not only do they construct their own identities, however, but they also construct those of others by projecting onto them pre-conceived ideas about who they are.
PROJECTION
On top of this discussion of social construction, there is an element of subjectivity and perception that has to be considered as well. One of the little ironies that sociologists Snyder, Tanke and Berscheid (1977) uncovered in the second half of the 20th century is that, as much as people may find stereotypes to be lamentable and unjust, the reality is that because of the fact that people are socially constructed, stereotyping has a self-fulfilling influence. In other words, people project onto others the characteristics and qualities that they expect to find and then they interpret the actions and behaviors of their targets according to the projected parameters with which they have defined them. Cognitive social psychology is a field that examines how this projection reinforces and informs the perpetuation of stereotypes and how stereotypical characteristics end up being perceived from one generation to the next.
As Snyder et al. (1977) note, “once a stereotype has been adopted, a wide variety of evidence can be interpreted readily as supportive of that stereotype, including events that could support equally well an opposite interpretation” (657). Stereotyping is a form of judgment-making that limits the human experience and restricts interpretation of data to preconceived biases, which end up being used to confirm the justification of the stereotype and thus ensure that it will be continued to be used to define and describe other human beings. This problematic because it can lead to the target person’s behavior undergoing a transformation: “stereotype-based attributions may serve as grounds for predictions about the target's future behavior and may guide and influence the perceiver's interactions with the target” (Snyder et al. 1977:658). By placing social constraints on others through the application of stereotype lenses, others become boxed by these constraints and all interactions between the two end up being defined by this stereotype. One’s preconceived notions of others lead to a type of confirmation bias that does not actually allow for an objective assessment to take place. The social construction of the other is pre-determined by other cultural or social inputs and expectations rather than being based upon experience.
These interactions can be both verbal and non-verbal. They can consist of remarks that one makes to another or they can consist of body language movements and gestures. When the former are involved, they communicate their own ideas and reinforce attitudes on both sides. Word, Zanna and Cooper (1974) refer to this as the “nonverbal mediation of self-fulfilling prophecies” and they link it to another exchange or social interaction typically informed by stereotypes—that of interracial interaction (509). Interaction settings can also play a role in mediating pre-conceived ideas about identity, and understanding the influences—both external and internal—that impact a person’s perception of another is important in understanding how social construction takes place even today.
One’s first impression of another is often an occasion of when confirmation biases or projections of pre-conceived ideas are experienced most (Flora 2004). This is why meeting new people can often be so difficult: one is not just meeting a new person but is also struggling internally with myriad impressions that are informing the person’s mind about who this other individual is. These internal impressions hail from past experiences, or proverbs from one’s grandmother, or images one has seen on television or heard on the radio, or any other input that society so often provides free of charge. They are all internalized and all rush up to the surface at once when a new individual has been met, because the mind is working to see how that individual can be labeled. Individuals socially construct one another’s identities as much as they do their own. Instead of actually getting to know others, they are usually socially constructed within the mind and that is the extent of it.
The everyday judgments that people make are full of the kind of systematic biases that are associated with stereotyping that one picks up in the media, among peers or from groups (Gilovich 1997). Yet, these judgments not only reinforce concepts within the self, they also shape the way others think of themselves, too. As Cooley (1983) notes, “the social origin of self comes by the pathway of intercourse with other persons. There is no sense of “I”…without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they” (261). The self-image is a learned self, a learned identity, that one deliberately and not so deliberately sets out to construct. The image that has in one’s head of oneself is not always the same as how others see one, either. Thus, in a relationship, one partner may feel he is being fair and kind to the other, while the other may feel as though he is being cruel and uncaring. The perception of actions and their meanings can be over-focused on or missed altogether because inside the mind people are dealing with their own construction of self and their own cognitive dissonance. Unless conformity or alignment can be reached between the two, there is likely to be a break-up.
CONCLUSION
The social-construction of human beings is part of life. People receive inputs from all around them about who they are, who others are, who they should be, why they are the way they are, and so on. They receive or reject these inputs based on others that were there beforehand—ones that came from books or parents or teachers or peers from one’s past. These notions may be traded or confirmed over time or altered so as to resolve some feeling cognitive dissonance—but all the while the person is constructing an image of the self in the mind. That person is conforming to an image or ideal that has been projected by bits and pieces of information absorbed from media, peers and groups and used to construct an overall picture of what that person should be. Behavior is constructed to fit that mold and people are judged according to pre-conceived notions and stereotypes. People project their socially constructed identities onto others and vice versa. Social interaction is a two-way street in which one is constantly in a state of construction or becoming, as some sociologists have stated in the past. People thus socially construct themselves and one another all the time, inside and out.
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