The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge

I use this extremely interesting book in a sociology of education course for master's degree students from a broad range of disciplines. Most have never taken a course in sociology or a closely related discipline, and to many the material seems alien, contrived, and contrary to the world as they know it. Making Berger and Luckmann accessible and persuasive to those who find it dense and unreal may best be done through use of concrete examples from the everyday world of the students themselves. Something like the following can be helpful:

An SAT exam consists of nothing more than a set of questions which are of no great interest in themselves. Taking the test, in and of itself, is not physically demanding, and the questions are not the sort that would cause discomfort or pleasure or any other response worth noting.

However, taking the SAT is a crucial point in a social process of selection, socialization, and allocation which may have profound consequences for one's entire future. Moreover one's score on the test may easily be construed as a measure of one's intellectual worth, and perhaps as a measure of one's occupational or moral worth, as well.

It is the relationship between the test and the very real consequences one anticipates because our society is organized in a certain way that provides the socially created meaning of the SAT.

Furthermore, the meaning of the questions on the exam is determined by their incorporation into a norm-referenced test. The meaning of the norm-referenced test is determined by its incorporation into a college admission process. The meaning of the college admission process is determined by its incorporation into a process whereby we determine who gets jobs, money, and occupational prestige. The meaning of jobs, money, and occupational prestige are determined by their place in a stratified social system that places substantial emphasis on material attainment. And so on.

Now, what would the SAT or, for that matter, jobs, money, occupational prestige ... mean in the Orinoco Delta of the Amazon River where indigenous people are isolated from the modern world. They survive by eating raw fish and more than one hundred varieties of naturally occurring plants, and the climate is tropical. There is no division of labor other than by sex; money does not exist; parents teach children by example all they need to know to live this particular life. Inhabitants take this socially created world as real, once and for all.

In other words, the SAT, jobs, money, occupational prestige, and so on have not been socially created -- they have no meaning --in this tropical society, but in our world they are conspicuous, socially created presences that we cannot ignore.

If you're going to make it the culture-industrial complex (i.e. music industry) you really should have some understanding and insight into how people view reality. Whether you're trying to get people to buy your record, come to your show or listen to your radio station- it's all part of the same influencing project, more or less. In a certain sense, the Social Consturction of Reality is probably the only book a non-specialist needs to read about this topic.

This book, in language as clear and straight-forward as you're likely to get, explains how reality is constructed from social intercourse. The analysis here starts from what normal people consider reality: being "wide awake" and experiencing "everyday" life. All of reality proceeds from face-to-face encounters that occur during the normal course of every-day life:


The social reality of everyday life is apprehended in a continuum of typifications, which are progreesively anonymous as they are removed from the "here and now" of the face-to-face situation. P. 33


Based on these encounters, humans create bodies of knowledge and categories of interactions. As a society grows more complex, these face-to-face encounters become abstracted into "expertise" and then passed down to new members of a society (children.):

Primary socialization thus accomplishes what is the most important confidence trick that society plays on the individual- to make appear necessit what is in fact a bundle of contongencies and this make meaningful the accident of his birth. P. 135


In this schema, it doesn't matter whether the society is pre-historic, religious, philosphical or scientific- the transmission process of reality via the use of expert knowledge is the same.

Over time, clusters of ideas/knowledge become institutions- like a religion or a mythology for example. People use ideas to explain "why."

Ultimately, Social Construction of Reality concludes with an observation as elegant as it is profound:

All symbolic universes and all legitimations are human products; their existence has it's base in the lives of concrete individuals, and has no empirical status apart from these lives. P. 128


In other words- reality is what we make it. Or to be more precise: Reality is what generations of humans living and dying over time make it. No more, no less. This is reality.

I first read this book in the 1970s and it maintains its importance in the canon of how knowledge emerges from human interactions.

I would say some of the low reviewers don't get the book, here maybe why. The book sets out to explain that we all, you, me and the writers all effect each other and co-create what we choose to accept as reality based upon what we learn from those closest to us or within our physical or mental periphery or states, Nations, academic circles, knitting clubs, sports clubs, etc.

We often set against one another over whose version of our reality tunnels represents the current zeitgeist of the times or best brings about the most happiness. Since we do this with and against each other, we maybe bring about our own understanding of existence and for some this means we reach for God and for other social groups we reach for nothing, but we gain these perspectives through our "social" situations that are created for us and we create for others or ourselves.

All of this existential "social" activity generates communication signals that can get distorted and interrupted or amplified in their paths. Many of our greatest insights, scientific discoveries and anomalous aspects of reality, ghosts, ufos, etc are created through these "social" situations we are pulled into kicking and screaming the moment we exit the womb. We gain our ability to talk, and various other abilities by copying each other, without copying and sharing these noise signals, some of them useful many of them not, we would not gain ability to survive.

So this book explains why we "socially" construct reality as not just a basis of "post-modernism" but as a basis of survival and novelty. Wouldn't one be mostly bored with a reality of few interactions, few signals? Why use the internet, after all it has been "socially constructed" not just by groups acting together, but also by individuals acting in concert with each other to gain information, experience, novelty and signals. even the notion of the "individual" only gains true value through the sharing of this knowledge with others in a socially constructed agreement.

One final note, in order to type and create and use "words" I had to take some social constructions of reality into consideration, for instance, I use English circa2009, so in a sense my reality describes for the most part these times or moments, I learned how to use these words by studying symbols created in order to facilitate communication with others, reality in the most basic ways begins with making decisions on which words I should use, what ways I should structure them or space them, this requires understanding of ever more socially created standards. In the same sense our Internet browsing equipment uses languages of software that "we" create and share with each other to make our computers and everyone else's more useful, more interesting and worth bothering with. Just about all of these decisions are the acts of individuals that gathered on BBS's to share thoughts and ideas about how best to implement these networks.

It would be very much impossible to even type a review on this board without having learned English, bought a computer, learned how to use it, and that would require a "social" effort or construction on the part of the doer to even participate. So this book very much indeed offers a profound almost "meta-programming" kind of learning experience, a sort of thinking about thinking exercise that leads to wonderful understanding of very simple and yet enormously important thoughts about meaning and the grounding of that in the social environment and how escaping that would mean finding death possibly. Sure one can be a hermit and live alone, but even in that sense one still eats and interacts with natural systems, even if they can't speak English they still choose and create how they do communicate. In order for there to not have a socially constructed environment one would have to somehow survive being a baby without anyone there to feed and care for one, most hard science shows that pretty much all babies not nurtured don't survive, so being a total individual, just doesn't conform to a scientific understanding of the way the world currently functions. I'm not saying that it maybe not possible to grow humans in test tubes isolated from people in the future ala Brave New World, or that it might exist, I just think not right now, or have seen no evidence yet. I'm not and I am sure the writers are not saying we don't want and should need individual rights, they are merely stating that they are built by us. Our rights come from our ability to communicate and agree or disagree on whatever we decide about or have interest in. Just because the writers are not aware of something important to you doesn't mean your "reality" doesn't exist, just that you create it and decide what meaning or value you place upon it.

This discontinuity of everybody constructing their realities only gets upsetting when your version of reality doesn't get placed at the top of the heap or "best" ideas or thoughts or living systems. Pretty much anyone could get offended by feeling as if they were not given higher status. Look at nations and pecking orders, a good book for that would be The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History these writers were fully aware of the fact that this book would anger those that derive understanding from some "spooky" somewhere else, ala God, etc. Since it would imply that God also can be considered as nothing more than a social construction, and it most certainly appears, as do calendar systems as well. Sure we can refer to hard physical objects in space-time but they lose meaning when granted millions or billions of years of time, take any course about Geography to better understand that even physical systems exist as signals connected to other systems that interact with each other,Solar systems are socially affected by planets and these planets are affected by objects such as asteroids, etc. Galaxies are socially connected but by very far distances, but I would imagine a complete physics system would include all interactions no matter how distant. Or take theory of the big bang. Sure even the ideas are constructed but they all have dependence and connection to one another in a physical manner. This book doesn't address some of my thoughts but by reading it you can understand why I have these thoughts and you can then feel more socially connected to my constructed point of view. Adios!

A couple of other titles to check if you dig this one...
Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World
How real is real?: Confusion, disinformation, communication
Unconditional Freedom: Social Revolution Through Individual Empowerment
Listen, Little Man! (Noonday, 271)

Well, since the gist of it is in page 1, is reality socially constructed, or isn't? Careful, here. If you want to answer "Yes!" as most reviewers of this book seem eager to do, I'll ask, is this book socially constructed? And are you socially constructed and therefore (if the answer has been yes, remember) do not have an independent existence outside this social construction? How can two socially-constructed creatures such as the authors of this book be aware of the socially-constructed reality of others and not mention their own? Who gave them the red (or blue) pill (The Matrix calling)?

Totalizing theories of reality tend to fall hard, every time, down the same hole. The postmodernist version is only slightly more sophisticated, alleging that reality is not only socially constructed, but that there are myriad realities, one (or more) per each human being on the planet. Naturally, jumping from there to the "discovery" that science is nothing but a Western, socially-created invention that has had its run and it's about time to replace it with "something" else, is not that difficult; it's even inevitable, and one reviewer makes the Kuhn-connection immediately. Berger and Luckmann have the gift of being able to stand outside this man-made reality, see it for what it is, and denounce it; all of this without apparent contamination from the same socially-constructed reality that has socially-constructed their ideas and theories.

Kuhn made the same mistake; no wonder scientists only smile at his ideas. But "social" scientists, some philosophers, and literary theorists (my field of study) loved The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and they really held on to the concept of "paradigms" as if their lives depended on it. Socially-constructed Thomas Kuhn came up with ideas that Berger and Luckmann, prisoners of their paradigm, develop a bit more. Kuhn announced that "all" of us are trapped in our paradigm, and yet he could escape, see The Truth (yes, capitalized), and come back-to-the-muck to tell us about it. Thanks, Tom. These two authors do essentially the same. They and the reviewers that obviously loved the book (there were a few lucid ones there: hope for humanity, I guess) seem blissfully unaware of how their theory eats itself from the tail.