Are Social Constructs Controlling Your Life?

In this episode of American Socrates, we break down what it actually means for something to be a social construct. You’ll learn how ideas can be both invented and real at the same time. We trace the roots of social construction from philosophers like Hume and Kant to modern thinkers, and explain how institutions and collective belief shape our world.

Far from being just academic theory, this episode shows how social constructs shape your daily life, your identity, and your place in society. We also explore how recognizing them gives us the power to challenge injustice and reimagine the world we live in.

Whether you're new to the term or trying to understand what it means for real people in the real world, this is your clear and grounded guide to one of the most misunderstood ideas in modern thought.

Transcript

If you have a dollar bill in your wallet, pull it out, take a look at it. It's just paper, right? There's nothing special about the material. You can't eat it, it's not going to keep you warm. But if you hand it to a cashier, maybe you can walk out with dinner or put a little gas in your tank. That little rectangle can get you part of the way around your town, or keep your lights on for another couple of days, but only because everyone agrees that it can't. If you tried to pay someone in monopoly money, they'd laugh at you. Same paper, same ink, same style, same nominal value. But what gives one the power to actually pay for things and the other one not? Let's take another example here, time zones. In one town, it's 11 at night, but if you go a few more miles to the east, somehow, it's already tomorrow. The sun didn't jump ahead, the earth didn't shift, but on one side of an imaginary line, people are going to bed, and on the other, they're starting to wake up. That's not nature. That's us. It's a made-up rule so that we can coordinate things like planes and jobs and Zoom calls. You see the same thing in national borders. You're a few feet north of an invisible line in the dirt. Congratulations. You're an American. Born just a little farther south, you'd be a Mexican. Different rights, different chances, maybe a different fate. That one shift in where your mom happened to be standing can decide a lot, not because the soil really changed or anything about the environment, but because we, as a people, say so. Land ownership, that one's wild when you really think about it. You can own a piece of the earth, a hill, a field, a chunk of concrete. You didn't make it. You can't move it. But if your name's on the deed, the law is going to back you up here. That's your land now. You can sell it, you can rent it. You can pass it on to your kids. And what about everybody else? Well, they have to keep out unless you let them in. That's not nature. That's not a natural order to anything. Those are man-made agreements. So here's the big question. How can something that we just made up? How can something we just made up be so powerful? It feels like a force of nature. All of these ideas, money, time zones, nationality, and land ownership, are what we call social constructs. They're not physical laws like gravity. They didn't grow out of the ground. We built them. We made them up. We teach them. And then we tend to forget that we made them up. Just because they're made up doesn't mean that they're not real. In fact, they shape just about every part of your life. People are happy to deny social constructs exist when they don't like them, but also happy to admit that they're just social behavior when they do like them. So today, I thought I'd ask, what exactly is a social construct, really? And I want to start with a simple analogy. You might label a wrench, a tool, because of its use. It's not a weapon, it's a tool. Someone could use it as a weapon, or they could use it as a piece of art, or something else. The object itself doesn't change, but the category that it fits into because of how it's used, ultimately does, depending on the context and the human judgment about the object. Our judgments then play an important role in what something is, and that forms the limitation or the horizon of what people believe something can do or be. It might not matter too much to us when it comes to wrenches, but when we start to construct people that is classify them and label them, it matters a great deal. The limitations we put on a person because they're black or woman or transgender, those really do matter. So let's rewind the clock here. Way before sociology classrooms were talking about this, or you could find an activist hashtags long before people even had the phrase social construct in their vocabulary. We could find the roots of this in some of the earliest cracks in our car confidence about what's real and what isn't real. One of the first people to swing a hammer at that confidence was the Scottish philosopher David Hume. It was Hume in the 1700s who asked the ridiculous question, How do we know that cause and effect are real? Like, really real, not just felt or not just believed, but like proved them to be true. So you light a match and it burns. You do it again, you get the same result. Eventually, you think fire causes burning. But Hume points out, we never actually see this cause. What we've done is to recognize a pattern. The key is in the repetition. We've grown used to seeing things happening together, but we don't discover any kind of necessary link between one thing and the next. So what does that mean? Well, it means that we live by the habits of thought, he says. Customs, expectations. And if that's true for even something as basic as cause and effect, we can and should ask, what else are we just going along with? It might turn out that we don't actually know much other than our ideas and some raw observations. Okay, fast forward a few decades and we arrive at Imanuel Kant. Kant took Hume seriously and worried that he was completely right about this. He said, it's not just that we believe things like time and space and cause. These are ideas we have, no doubt. But he wondered, where do we really get them? For Kant, he said, our minds need these categories in order to understand the world at all. And so they're just plugged into us by nature or God in order to help us survive. In other words, we're not born just blank slates waiting for the world to tell us what's real. We are builders of the world. We name it. We try to make sense of it. We impose a kind of order on it. The human mind has a built-in scaffolding, and everything we know, everything we see gets shaped through that scaffolding. We don't just see the world as it is. We organize it. We, and this is the tricky bit here, we organize it as we look at it. This is not some sort of conscious action on our part. We don't look around the classroom and see shapes and color, patches of light and dark. We organize that immediately, subconsciously, so that we actually see chairs and desks and people and books and other things because our minds are organizing the world on according to our concepts as we look at it in the moment, in real time. So already, long before the term social construction ever existed, you've got this radical idea that reality, at least as we live it, is not just handed to us by nature. It's filtered through us. We bring something to it. We sort it all out. We know make sense of it. We make meaning out of it. This is the thrust of enlightenment thinking. And that's the one that opens the doors to much bigger ideas. Like if our minds help shape what we we know about the world, then what about our societies and ourselves? Doesn't it shape those as well? What happens when we move from how we see the world to how we agree to live in it? That's where the early sociologists come in and pick up this concept from philosophy. You get sociologists like Emile Durkheim, who started pointing out that societies are full of things that feel really solid, but are built entirely out of shared belief, like the idea of the sacred. What makes a cross or a national flag sacred to us? It's not anything about the object itself. It's what we've decided it means together as a people. A cross to a Christian is a different thing than a cross to a non-Christian. And so it is with a lot of the things that we think are normal or natural or just the way the world is. Karl Marx, who said that the ruling ideas of any age are just the ideas of the ruling class, or, in other words, the way we think about class, labor, ownership, it's not just natural or normal, it's built. It's constructed. It's structured by those who hold power. And thus, it's a historical development that can and will eventually change. So piece by piece, our human picture starts to come together, when We don't just live in raw reality, where we passively see the world as it is. We live in a reality filtered by thought, structured by society's dominant ideas, and reinforced by its institutions. And that's the birth of social construction. What parts of our world are real because we made them real? And which parts, if any, would be real without us? And maybe even more important to our current discussion, what parts do we think are natural when really they're not? Okay, yeah, the first threads of this go back to humankantant, but how did this idea of social construction take shape today? How did thinkers start to put a name and a framework to it? One of the landmark books here is The Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman from 1966. They explained social reality as a kind of three-st dance between people. First, there was externalization, and that's when we create things, not objects in the world, but the ideas, the norms, the concepts, the systems that we use to carve up what we get from our senses. so that we can understand that what we're looking at or listening to or smelling, et cetera. We build our world through what we say, what we believe, and what we do. Again, like with Kant, we are making reality real through the externalization of our inner understanding of it. For example, when I see a car go down the road, I know it to be a car. I see color, I see shape, and movements, and they happen to align with the things that I conceptualize of as a car. There's dark circles, for example, where I believe tires should go, a glassy transparency right where the windshield ought to be. There's a silvery shape in the form of a familiar car car maker's logo. All of it comes together, and it happens so incredibly fast that I don't even notice this process. I just recognize the thing as a car. The second thing is objectification. That's when those creations take on a life of their own, as if they existed somehow independently from me. This happens when they get accepted in society. Other people adopt these ideas with, of course, slight variations, and they take them in new directions. Think about the way money or calendars work. Yeah, we made those up. But now they seem pretty fixed, Pretty solid. This is just the way things are. You know, just because you don't think money has value doesn't mean it doesn't. Because they only work when everyone thinks of them in more or less the same way, it moves beyond the individual. It's not like a dollar can be a little money to you and a large sum to me. The value of a dollar has to be somewhat consistent, even though, of course, it's never perfectly consistent. The third thing is internalization. That's when we're born into these systems and learn them so deeply that we just accept them as natural, as the way the world is. We don't question them. This is just the way things are in this country, in this state, in this town, in this family,. It's just normal. It's common sense. It's shared understanding. It's ideology. It's just being realistic. Of course, as good critical thinkers, we know better than that. We try to know better than that anyway. But it's hard to get away from these basic ideas that we inherited from our parents and our teachers and our mentors and other people that we cared about. With this process is always ongoing. Society shapes us, and we keep shaping society in a long, arcing loop. I also want to mention briefly here, Michel Foucault, the French French thinker from the 20th century, who added yet another layer on top of this. Foucault showed us how power and knowledge are ultimately linked. What we call truth or normal isn't neutral or just fair. It's been shaped by those who hold power in our society. Categories like madness, criminality, or even healthy, aren't just scientific facts. They're social constructs and often tools that are used to control or organize people, ultimately to the desires of the powerful, that is, the wealthy or the smart or the strong or somebody. Institutions, then, like prisons and schools and hospitals don't just enforce laws. They enforce these constructed categories. This means social constructs aren't harmless or just academic curiosities relating to how we think about things. They affect how people live, who gets rights, who gets judged a criminal, who gets certain types of jobs. And then you have thinkers like Judith Butler, who focus on how identity itself is performed and shaped by social expectations. Without going into into gender or sex here, the key point is, is that our identities aren't just something inside of us that we discover. They're acted out. They're reinforced, and sometimes resisted in everyday life. We and those around us build us into a type of identity, our political identity, our scientific identity. It takes something like biological sex, and it's not that we can't say people with penises or male and people with vulvas are female. It's that the ones making the choice to say that to define what people are that way and not some other way is a choice. And short, biology itself is a social construct. So in any biological sex is itself socially constructed. So social construction isn't about making things up, not in a trivial sense, anyway. It's about understanding that many of the things that we take for granted, like money, law, health, identity, all of those are built by humans and shaped by culture and power, and maintained through a sense of collective belief. And once you see it this way, you start to notice how these real things depend on social agreement to exist or otherwise evolveving. Being born, growing, changing, and sometimes dying. Ideas can die. Okay, so far, we've been talking about how our minds and some society shape reality, but what about us, the people living inside all of these ideas? In other words, I want to shift the discussion from the construction part of social construction to the social part of it. Let me introduce you to Charles Horton Cooley. Cooley, way back in the early 1900s, gave us a simple but powerful image, the Looking glass Self. You look in a mirror, not just any mirror, a social mirror. It's made up of tens of thousands of eyes, thoughts, and judgments from all of the other people around you, everyone you've ever had an interaction with, even minor interactions. Cooley tells us then that who you are depends on a lot on what you think others see when they look at you. You put it like this, I am not who I think I am. I am not who you think I am. I am who I think you think I am. In other words, your sense of self isn't born in isolation. It's a reflection. It's a product of how you imagine other people see you. Let's go back to that performative notion of Judith Butler's for a second. How do I become a cowboy? Well, if I want to be thought of as a cowboy, I need other people to look at me and treat me like a cowboy, to recognize me as a cowboy. So I have to transform myself in a manner that others will recognize. I need things like shit kicker boots, a stetson hat, you know, blue jeans, a big, shiny belt buckle, all the stereotypes. If I perform enough of them for other people, they're going to start to treat me like the cowboy I want them to treat me like. And so I'm looking at them to reflect back to me who I am. Am I being a good cowboy? Am I not being a good cowboy? I am succeeding in being a cowboy here only if they tell me I am acting like a good cowboy. So this isn't a matter of individual identity. You can can't just say, I want to be a cowboy, and therefore I am a cowboy, right? It does not work like that. This is a social construction. So, isn't a matter of individual identity unless our society alone allows us that kind of flexibility? There are places in our society where, you know, people just let people pick their own names or something like that. You know, you can construct yourself individually that way because society gives you that opportunity. Take the battle over transexuality here. This is what it's actually over. It's not a question of whether it's socially constructed or not. It's socially constructed. It's a question of who gets to socially construct people. Should we be allowed to tell people what their sex and gender are, or should they be allowed to decide for themselves what kind of person they want to be? This is a matter of whether we're going to individually construct sexuality or whether we are going to socially construct it for people. In other words, should our society allow people to construct their own sexuality or should we pigeonhole people into pre chosen assortments of options without either their input or their opinions? And the reason it's a battle is because all of those reflections are coming from society and carry with them all of society's rules, all of its prejudices, all of its biases, and all of its power dynamics. Think about it. It's society treats you as a criminal, a failure, somehow less than. Over time, that reflection is going to shape how you see yourself. It creates a sort of negative feedback loop. You start acting in ways that match those expectations because that's how you're going to get treated anyway, whether or not they're fair or whether or not they're true. That's why social constructions matter so deeply. They're not just abstract ideas, but they're forces that shape how people live and feel inside their own skin. We make black people feel foolish and violent through our expectations of them in racismism, by simply expecting them to be this way. And when they meet our expectations, we shrug and say, see, I told you. And when they don't, we scratch our heads and say, they're probably some kind of weirdest exception. Your identity, then, is not just something inside you. It's been created and recreated every day through your interactions with the people around you. You want to be a different person? You can be. You need to change the people who ultimately you surround yourself with. That's what makes social construction so powerful and so controversial. It's the power to make other people who they are. Let's pause here for a second, because this idea of recognition deserves a closer look. It's not just about how we see ourselves. It's about how we become in the eyes of others, and how that recognition can give and take power. Well, let's take the example of a king. You strip away the goal, you strip away the throne, the titles, and you're left with just a person, a man. But when people bow, when they obey this person's commands, when they call him things like your Majesty,, that's when his power becomes real, not because of bloodlines or destiny, but because enough people simply agree to treat him as something more than themselves. It's the same thing with land ownership. You know, the Earth doesn't hand out property deeds. There's no stamp from nature that says, this belongs to you and everybody else is excluded. But if you write your name on a legal document and everybody recognizes this legal document is valid, suddenly that land is really yours. Everyone else is excluded. Not because the soil says so, but because society does. Recognition then turns acclaim into a real right. And this doesn't just happen to the top. It's everywhere. Take labor. Tenant farmers work the land, they plastic, they plant, they harvest. But legally, the landowner is the one who gets called the farmer. He gets the title, the subsidies, the respect. Why? Because we recognize ownership above work.. Think about gig workers. An Uber driver might put in 12 hours a day behind the wheel, but the company calls him an independent contractor. He receives no benefits. He has no job security security. None of the laws about employment apply to him because he's running his own independent business. There's no real recognition of him as an employee. Maybe it's just a trick of a language, a way to profit from labor without taking responsibility for the laborer. It's like a machine. The workers here are the moving parts. They're essential, they're driving the whole system, but the system is treats them like cogs. They're replaceable, they're nameless, they're interchangeable. The work gets done, but the recognition, the credit, the identity, that goes somewhere else. The deeper point then, is that reality isn't just what happens. It's the story that we've all agreed to tell about the way things are. It's a stage play, and everyone has a part here. If the audience stops believing in the play, then the whole thing falls apart. Because the moment we stop believing a story, we make space for new ones, and we rest control of the narrative away from those in power and take it for ourselves. Now, if you've been listening to all of this and thinking, okay, but this all sounds like mental gymnastics. Well, you're not alone. A lot of people hear the phrase social construct, and just roll their eyes. And honestly, that reaction makes sense because the term is often tossed around so carelessly that it's losing its meaning. So I want to clear a few things up. The first objection might be, what if this is all just made up? Yes, it is just made up. That's the whole point. Money is just made up. So we're traffic laws, calendars, national borders, and marriage certificates. But just try ignoring those things, pretending like they don't exist because they're made up. Try telling the IRS you don't actually owe them any money, or that your landlord can't require rent of you because he doesn't actually own property. Try building a house on somebody else's land and just see what happens. Made up doesn't mean meaningless. It doesn't mean it's not real. It means that we are the ones who made it through belief, through repetition, through power. And because we made it, it binds us. That's the strange strength of a social construct. It's imaginary, but it's also enforcible. The second objection might be, so you're saying it's not really real. No, we're saying it is real because people treat it is real. That's really what it takes. A border is just a line on the map, but it can determine who lives, who dies, whether you can cross it, whether you'll be arrested for crossinging it. Race is not a biological fact of nature, but being a member of a certain race does have real consequences. The police will treat you differently if you're black than if you're white. Sexual orientation, wealth, citizenship, these things aren't written in nature. They're written into institutions, into policies, and lives, all of which, though, are human creations. So, no, they're not really fake in that sense. They're constructed. A third objection might be, isn't this just overthinking? Maybe. But here's the thing. If you're the one benefiting from a construct, you're the one who's privileged enough to call it overthinking. But if you're the one who's getting crushed by a construct, then you don't really get that luxury. All of these constructs are costly to build and even more costly to maintain. And they usually favor one person or one group over another. Justice is socially constructing a world that would be fair for all persons and all groups. What mostly happens to us is we have one privileged group who benefits from a certain socially constructed arrangement and another who is oppressed by it. The oppressed ones want to change it, and the privileged ones say you can't, because these are just the way things are. This is just nature. This is just reality. Think about who gets recognized as deserving and who gets called dangerous in our society, or who gets labeled hardworking and who gets called beautiful. These aren't neutral labels. They're part of a system that sorts people, sometimes from the moment they're born, and they're not natural. So, no, this is not overthinking. It's seen the wiring behind the walls. So let me be extra clear here. Construction does not mean it's imaginary, just because something is built by people doesn't mean it's not real. Skyscrapers are built by people, so are prisons, so are laws. Constructed does not equal optional. You don't get to opt out of your race or your class just because you say you don't believe in these things. These systems aren't based on your personal attitude. They're enforced by institutions, by social customs, and behind those by violence. Constructed things can be more rigid than natural ones. People will go to war over a flag or a stretch of lakefront real estate, but no one, as far as I know, has ever gone to war over the periodic table of elements. So constructed things, just because they're not reflecting some sort of scientific reality, doesn't mean that they don't bring serious consequences. Sometimes people hear social construct and think it means anything goes. Like, it's all up for grabs. But that's not what this theory is actually saying. It says, if something was made by humans, it can be unmade by humansans or made differently. Unmaking something takes power. It takes struggle, it takes coordination. And until that happens, the construct will hold. We need constructs. They organize our life and give us beautiful things. The problem is which constructs we empower and who's doing the constructing. Is it all of us getting together and deciding that women are inferior to men? Or is that really men who made that decision and women just had to live with it? Social constructs are real because people live and die by them. And they very well should. But we need to be more conscious of what we have constructed, why we constructed it. And if it still serves us or if it's only serving a small part of us. So here we are. We've gone from the Enlightenment philosophy to modern sociology, from kings and deeds to gig workers and gears. And we've seen how much of the world we live in, our roles, our rules, our relationships, are held together, not by nature, but simply by belief. That's what makes social construction so powerful and so strange. It doesn't sit there like gravity or DNA. It exists in the minds, in the actions, in the rituals, and the deeds of ordinary human beings. It lives in how we treat each other and how we see ourselves. It only works because we all play along. So if these constructs are real, because we recognize them, that means they depend on us. And that means we have a kind of power over them that's easy to miss under the weight of all these constructs that we didn't create. We think of power as money, muscle, and laws, but there's another kind, and that's the thing power to name, the power to define, the power to make something real just by agreeing that it's real. That's what a border does. That's what money does. That's what identity does. That's what a king is. A king is power all the way up until we stop bowing. When enough people believe something, when they act on it, when they reinforce it, when they build institutions around it, it becomes real. Real enough to live inside, real enough to kill for, to die for, real enough to pass on to your children. It is what is most divine within us, our human capacity to order the world and to make real what was only an idea. What other species rewrites the world through shared imagination? What other creature invents rules, roles, and rituals, and then lives by them as if they were written in the stars? It's terrifying sometimes, but it's also beautiful. We don't just inherit the world, we shape it, we make meaning, we make structure, we make reality, and then we forget that we were the ones who made it. Sometimes we think it's God, but it was us, our shadow, on the mountain side, all along. So I'll leave you with this, if our shared reality isn't working for all of us, shouldn't we work together to build something different? Thanks for tuning in toAmerican Socrates. If today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, make sure to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. New, full episodes drop every Wednesday.. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps others find us and it means a lot. And if you know someone who could use a little more practical wisdom in their life, share this episode with them. Want more? Visit Americansocrates.buzzsprout.com for show notes, resources, and exclusive content. You can also follow me on Facebook, Blue Sky, or TikTok, to keep the conversation going Until next time, keep questioning everything.