Social Construction

Lecture Supplement

Cognition is about knowing the world -- about forming mental representations of the world outside the mind.  Put another way, the goal of cognition is to acquire, retain, and use knowledge about reality.  In social cognition, the reality is social in nature: Other people and their behavior; ourselves, and our own behavior; and the situations in which we interact with others.

But what kind of reality is social reality?  

The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment Stance

The philosophical roots of this question go back to the debate between the realists and the idealists.

• The realists (e.g., Kant) assumed that the objects of perception exist independently of our perception of them.
• The idealists (e.g., Berkeley) asserted that the objects of perception do not exist independent of the activities of our own minds.  That is, some properties of objects are intrinsic to the objects themselves, but other properties are context-dependent.

The realists won this battle, leading to what Casirer (1932) called the Enlightenment Stance of the 17th and 18th centuries.  The Enlightenment thinkers contrasted with medieval thought, with its emphasis on knowledge acquired through authority (and its tendency to fall into superstition).  For Locke, Voltaire, Diderot, and other Enlightenment figures, knowledge was not given, but rather was acquired through reason.  reason is the central human capacity (a view that comes from Descartes, at least), and in turn permits correct thought and action. 

Other enlightenment precepts:

• Humans are rational by nature.
• Human nature is not given, but can progress to perfection.
• All humans are equally rational.
• Tolerance for the beliefs of others -- provided that they were rational (a position known as cosmopolitanism).
• And acceptance of beliefs based on reason.

• A French Enlightenment, centered on Mostesquieu, voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Condorcet.
• A British Enlightenment, beginning with Newton and continuing with Locke, Hume, and Adam Smith (Hume and smith were, of course, Scots, so this could be called the "Scottish Enlightenment", too). 
  
• And there was an "American" Enlightenment, too, derived mostly from Britain and France: think of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.
  
• A German Enlightenment including Leibniz and Kant, as well as the Dutch Spinoza.

Of course, an important implication of Cassirer's notion of an "Enlightenment Stance" is that the Enlightenment was not confined to a specific period of time, but rather represents a way of thinking, based on human rationality, that laid the foundation for the importation of the scientific method to all realms of thought.

The Enlightenment, in turn, stimulated a "Counter-Enlightenment" in some quarters of the Catholic Church, and other conservatives, who thought that the Enlightenment was responsible for the Terror of the French Revolution.  Later in the 19th century, another countervailing force arose in the form of a Romantic philosophy that emphasized myth, tradition, emotion -- and unconscious mental life (think Freud).  And again in the 20th century, some critics argued that the ultra-rationalism of the Enlightenment was indirectly responsible for the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany.  And certain "post-modern" thinkers (where "modern" = Enlightenment), like Foucault, argued that values, and even truths, might not be universal (a point that we'll take up in detail below).  For details and references, see "the Great Fight Over the Enlightenment" by Keith Thomas, New York Review of Books, 04/03/2014).

Enlightenment thinking was, of course, closely tied to the Scientific Revolution in the West: In the Enlightenment view, the laws of nature are inexorable -- they are universal, exist independently of the mind, and can be discovered through reason (including scientific experiment).  The enlightenment Stance concerning the nature of reality is well expressed by the physicist (and Nobel laureate) Steven Weinberg:

"Any intelligent alien anywhere would have to come upon the same logical system as we have to explain the structure of protons and the nature of supernovae."

Yes, But...

All scientists embrace something like The Enlightenment Stance, because we think that there are facts about how the world works, including facts about how the mind works, that are out there to be discovered by observation, experiment, and reason.  At the same time, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and other social scientists harbor the uneasy feeling that some of the facts we're trying to discover are actually facts of our own making.  That is, that at some deep level our beliefs create the very reality that we're trying to understand.

Constructivism in Nonsocial Cognition

This is true in nonsocial cognition.  Neisser (1976) has emphasized that perception is not merely a process by which information in the stimulus is conveyed to the perceiver.  Instead, he has described a perceptual cycle in which the perceiver approaches an object through a schema, or generalized mental representation.  Then the perceiver engages in some exploratory activity -- it could be something as simply as tilting his head -- which makes new information available to the perceiver, thus modifying the perceiver's schema.  This cycle is continued until a satisfactory mental representation of the object has been achieved.  Thus, the perceiver constructs his or her percepts through exploratory activity directed at the object of perception.

Constructivism in Perception

Neisser's perceptual cycle is just one example of a number of constructivist points of view on perception, dating back to the earliest days of experimental psychology (Helmholtz, 1867) and continuing up to the present (Hochberg, 1964; Gregory, 1966; Rock, 1980).  All constructivists argue that the proximal stimulus is inherently ambiguous, in that there is "an infinite array of distal configurations that are compatible with the momentary state of proximal stimulation".  

As an example, consider the relationship between object size, distance, and the size of the retinal image:

• Holding distance constant, the size of the retinal image is proportional to the size of the object.
• Holding size constant, the size of the retinal image is proportional to the distance of the object.

Thus stimulation must be disambiguated -- perhaps by virtue of an a priori model of the world (a schema), or by the application of inference -like rules.  In this way, perceiving entails thinking and problem-solving behavior.  We are not perceptually aware of the world, but only of our mental representation of it: perception is a construction of the current environment.

(Re)Constructivism in Memory

With respect to memory, Bartlett (1932) argued that the information in the memory trace was also ambiguous -- vague, fragmentary, and incomplete.  Similarly, he also argued that trace information must be disambiguated - -again, by the application of mental schemata and inferential rules.  Remembering also entails thinking and problem-solving.  Remembering, no less than perceiving, entails thinking and problem-solving.  We do not remember the past, but only our mental representations of past events: memory is a reconstruction of the past.

The point of all of this is that perception entails constructive activity on the part of the perceiver, and remembering entails reconstructive activity on the part of the rememberer.  What we perceive are our constructions of the present; and what we remember are our reconstructions of the past.

Constructivism in Social Cognition

This is all the more true when it comes to social reality and social cognition. 

• As scientists, we share the premise that we do not perceive the world, but only our representations of it -- meaning that there is a reality that exists outside the mind, imperfectly perceived by the mind.
• But there is an individual variant of constructivism that holds that these representations are, to some extent, the product of cognitive constructions.
• And there is a social variant of constructivism that holds that these representations are, to some extent, influenced by social and culture structurs and processes that lie outside the individual mind.

• Cognition of social reality: understanding a social world that exists independently of the individual mind.
• Creation of social reality: constructing the social world through acts of thought and behavior.

In large part, social reality is created through expectancy confirmation processes related to Merton's notion of the self-fulfilling prophecy:

Definitions of a situation... become an integral part of the situation and thus affect subsequent developments....  The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true.  The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy creates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning. Such are the perversities of social logic.  

Following Snyder (1978), Darley and Fazio (1980), and Jones (1986), we can distinguish between three different expectancy confirmation processes operating at the individual level:

• Perceptual confirmation, by means of which the individual interprets ambiguous events as consistent with his or her prior expectations, creates a private reality for that person (and that person only).
• Behavioral confirmation, by means of which the individual elicits behaviors from another person that are consistent with his or her prior expectations, creates a public reality available to everyone.
• Self-Verification, by means of which the target of perception can, through his behavior, alter the perceiver's perception of him.

These three modes can be related to the person-situation interaction:

• Through perception: a Person who holds a particular belief cognitively transforms the Environment in such a way as to be consistent with that belief. 
• Through behavior: a Person who holds a particular belief engages in Behavior consistent with the belief, which in turn manipulates the Environment in such a way as to bring it into correspondence with that belief.
  
• And through behavior, the Target, who after all is part of the Environment, can elicit behavior from the Person that corresponds to the target's beliefs about himself.

Through behavior, private beliefs can create a public reality.  

We have already seen experimental demonstrations of expectancy confirmation effects, both perceptual and behavioral, in the classic experiments of Snyder, Swann, and others.  Now we approach the issue of social construction from other perspectives.

Constructive Alternativism

George Kelly's personal construct theory also provides a perspective on constructivism.  In Kelly's view, events can be construed in multiple ways.  People are able to choose among available constructs, to abandon old constructs that are no longer useful, and to acquire new constructs that are more useful.  Whatever the choice, the person's construal of the situation will shape his or her subjective reality, and this mental representation will determine his or her behavior.

Realism, Idealism, and Social Constructivism

The idea of social construction has its roots in the old philosophical debate between realism and idealism;

• Realism: the objects of perception exist in the world independent of our mental representations of them (Kant).
• Idealism: the objects of perception do not exist in the world independent of our mental representations of them (Berkeley).

Idealism does not deny that there is a real world outside the mind.  However, it does assert that some aspects of our perceptions are context dependent, appearing in some circumstances but not in others.  Therefore, these aspects of perception do not reflect intrinsic properties of the world, but rather are created in our minds.

Actually, there are two levels of constructivism.

According to the individual variant, our mental representations are the product of our individual cognitive constructions.  Thus, the moon on the horizon appears to be larger than the moon at zenith because of unconscious inferences in perception.

According to the social variant, our mental representations are the product of social and cultural forces.  The social variant is neatly expressed by the French philosopher and writer Simone de Beauvoir, who asserted that "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman".  By this she meant that biological differences between the sexes (chromosomal endowment, primary and secondary sex characteristics) do not determine gender, gender attributes, or gender relations.  These gendered attributes, in her view, were highly contingent on history and social structure.  Thus, definitions of masculinity and femininity may differ from one society, and one temporal epoch, to another.

Since de Beauvoir, the term "social construction" has become extremely trendy.  The philosopher Ian Hacking (1999) has listed dozens of books with some variant on "the social construction of X" in their titles -- including authorship, emotions, knowledge, nature, quarks, and even reality itself.  This last one gave Hacking the title for his book: The Social Construction of What?.  After all, reality is supposed to be what's real -- the reality that lies outside the individual's mind, knowledge of which is inexorable.

Something similar could be said about race, as discussed in the lectures on "Social Categorization".  setting aside the social construction of racial minorities, as expressed in policies such as the "one drop rule" for classifying people as African-American

it turns out that even racial majority categories, such as "Caucasian" or "white", are the product of social construction.

Deconstruction of Social Construction

In Hacking's view, all versions of social constructivism share the view that meanings are not inherent in objects and events, nor are they immutable.  Instead, meanings are historically contingent, and the products of social forces.

Beyond this, Hacking identifies several stages through which social constructivist theory can progress:

1. At the outset, some thing, X, appears to be inevitable, with some inherent, immutable meaning.
2. Then the theorist realizes that X need not have existed at all; or that it need not be as it is; or that it is not determined by the nature of things; or, simply, that it is not inevitable.
3. Then the theorist may determine that X is "quite bad as it is".
4. Finally, the theorist may judge that we would be better off if X were done away with altogether, or at least radically transformed -- actions that are possible precisely because X is not, after all, inevitable.

Hacking also distinguishes between traditional and "unmasking" social constructivists:

• Traditional social constructivists, in turn, come in two types: 
• Historical social constructivism simply argues that X is historically contingent.
• Ironic social constructivism asserts that X could have been different, but we're stuck with it now.
• Unmasking social constructivists assert that X is a bad thing, and we'd be better off without it; in their view, "X is stripped of its ideological authority".  They come in three types:
• Reformist social constructivists want to make X better.
• Rebellious social constructivists think that we can get along without X entirely.
• Revolutionary social constructivists want to change the whole world!

Hacking makes clear that there is a close connection between social constructivism and political ideology.  But, as the George Bush example shows, the ideology is not necessarily of the left.  And one doesn't have to be particularly political to take the idea of social constructivism seriously.

The Construction of Social Reality

That is because social constructivism raises important questions about the limits of knowledge.  We ordinarily think of objective reality as observer-independent, and of social constructions as somehow subjective, and thus observer-dependent.  But the philosopher John Searle (1995) has pointed out that this easy equation confuses ontogeny and epistemology.

With respect to ontogeny:

• Some things, like cats, have objective existence (like cats).
• Other things, like pains, have subjective existence.

With respect to epistemology,

• Some facts are observer-independent, in that they are intrinsically true, regardless of who entertains them, and regardless of what anyone thinks.
• That a cat is a mammal is an intrinsic, observer-independent fact.
• Other facts are observer-dependent, in that they exist only relative to a person's attitudes and intentionality. 
• That a cat is a pet is an observer-dependent fact.
• The interesting thing is that it's objectively true that the cat is a pet.

Thus, the distinction between observer-dependent and observer-independent features is not quite the same as the distinction between objective and subjective reality.

• Some aspects of the world are purely subjective, like consciousness; but they are observer-independent, in the sense that the contents of consciousness do not depend on what anyone else thinks or believes.  
• Other aspects of the world are observer-relative, like money; but they are objective features of the world, in that money is money for everyone.

Some post-modern claims concerning social constructivism can seem downright silly, but the philosopher John Searle finds that there is actually a deep and interesting philosophical claim: that there is "an objective reality that is what it is only because we think it is what it is". As proof, he offers the examples of money, marriage, and property rights. Money is money only because we say it is; but money is money, objectively -- it's not merely a matter of someone's belief. Same holds true for marriage and property rights, among many other things.

• There are some facts about the world, such as That object is a stone, and The moon causes tides, and Earthquakes often occur where tectonic plates meet, which are observer-independent, or intrinsic: regardless of what anyone thinks, a stone is a stone, the moon cause tides, and there's a relation between earthquakes and tectonic plates. Facts like these are both ontologically objective and epistemically objective.
• But there are still other facts about the world, such as That object is a paperweight, which are observer-relative, or observer-dependent: an object is a paperweight only because someone thinks of it that way -- or, in Searle's terms, because someone has assigned it that function. There's nothing about its intrinsic physical structure that makes it a paperweight. The fact that something is a paperweight is true, but it is true only because someone thinks it is true. Facts like this are ontologically subjective, because they're matter of belief. But they're also epistemically objective, because they're true regardless of whether anyone else thinks so.
• And there are other ontologically subjective claims about the world, such as The moon is beautiful tonight, which are epistemically subjective. I think the moon is beautiful, but someone else might not think so -- or even have a concept of beauty, or think it is applicable to something like the moon. As a mental phenomenon, the beauty of the moon is ontologically subjective, because it's a product of my mental activity. But it is also epistemically subjective, in that the fact that the moon is beautiful tonight may be true only for me and people very much like me.
• Finally, there are still other observer-relative claims about the world, such as Earthquakes are bad for real estate values, which are both ontologically subjective but epistemically objective. The evaluation of earthquakes as bad is true only because there's an observer like me who thinks about whether anything is bad or good. There would be no such thought if there wasn't someone with a mind to think it. That makes it ontologically subjective. But it's also objectively true that earthquakes are bad for real-estate values, because it's true regardless of whether anyone understands it.

It's tempting to cast all of this into a 2x2 table:

Searle put the distinction succinctly in Making the Social World (2010):

• "Ontological objectivity and subjectivity have to do with the mode of existence of entities.
• Epistemic objectivity and subjectivity have to do with [the] epistemic status of claims."
  

The paradox of social construction is expressed by Searle (1995) in this way:

How can there be "an epistemically objective social reality that is partly constituted by an ontologically subjective set of attitudes?"

Put another way -- Searle again, in Mind, Language, and Society (1998), 

How can there be "an objective reality that is what it is only because we think it is?"

Or, again,

How can there be objective facts about the world that are created only through shared belief?

First, let us remind us that this is, simply, the case:

• People exchange goods for money only because the government says that money has value; though it is money nonetheless.
• People are married only because the state says they are married; though they are married nonetheless.

• The whole argument seems circular, or a case of infinite regress.
• How can social reality function causally?  As Searle (1998) puts it: "How does it come about that in a world consisting entirely of physical and chemical elements there is a causal efficacy to the institutional reality of money, governments, universities, private property, marriages, and so on?"
• What is the role of language in creating institutional reality?  In social construction, language doesn't simply describe reality: it constitutes it.

Searle's solution to these puzzles begins with the notion of collective intentionality.  We usually think of intentionality in terms of statements taking the form "I believe that X", or "I wish that X" (where X = some proposition like "cars have wheels" -- that all intentionality is individual intentionality.  This is because most philosophers (except, perhaps, for thinkers like Hegel) want to avoid entities like group minds.  As such, collective intentionality is usually reduced to individual intentionality, in terms of statements of mutual belief like "I believe that X, and I believe that you also believe that X."  When there are a lot of people involved, however, such statements can get pretty long.  Characteristically, Searle cuts through this by simply asserting that individuals minds can entertain statements of collective intentionality like "We believe that X".  Just because intentionality has to exist in individual heads doesn't mean that all intentionality has to be expressed in the first-person singular.  Collective intentionality of this sort is the foundation of all social activity: without it, cooperative activities simply couldn't occur.  For Searle (1998), "a social fact is any fact involving two or more agents who have collective intentionality".  But there are also institutional facts, involving social institutions, not just social groups.  

In Searle's analysis, institutional facts emerge from the human capacity to assign functions to objects (Searle asserts, provocatively, that functions are observer-relative facts, because functions exist only relative to the observers who assign functions).  In the case of institutional reality, humans organized into social institutions assign status functions to objects and behaviors -- functions that they possess not because of their physical nature, but because the acceptance of that function by individuals organized into a collective.

Institutional reality is a product of constitutive rules, which not only regulate some activity, but make the activity possible in the first place.

• The regulative rule that we stop at red lights is a rule that controls driving behavior, which existed before the rule was put in place.
• The constitutive rule that players must not touch the ball with their hands creates the game of soccer, which does not exist except by virtue of this and similar rules.  Constitutive rules take the form: X counts as Y in Context C -- as in A goal counts as 6 points in the context of American football.

Thus, to return to the example of money, there is nothing about the physics of money that enables it to perform its functions as money.  Money, at least the kind of currency we are familiar with (which economists call fiat money), is money only because it has been declared to be money by a government agency.  

So Searle addresses the paradox, and the puzzles of social reality, as follows:

• Institutional reality is created by the collective assignment of status functions that are recognized and accepted within the collective.  It follows that, when collective acceptance disappears, the reality also disappears.
• The circularity is broken because it's not really the case that money is money because we say it's money.  Rather, money is money because we assign it a particular function in the exchange of goods and services.
• Institutional reality functions causally in a world of physical facts by virtue of collective acceptance of that reality.
• Language plays a role in institutional reality through performative utterances, in which "Saying X" creates Y.

Two Kinds of Reality, Two Kinds of Science

Searle has also noted that the distinction between observer-independent and observer-dependent facts is fundamental to the distinction between two types of science.

• The physical sciences deal with observer-independent facts about force, mass, gravity, and the like.
• The social sciences deal with observer-relative facts about culture, organizational structure and behavior, and economic laws.

An interesting case is that of economics:

• Some economists, like Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, appear to believe that economic principles are like physical laws, immutable, and applicable at all times and in all places.
• Other economists, like Thomas Pikett in Capital in the 21st Century (2014), argue that economic "laws" are shaped by norms, values, and choices which are --- well, choices, and thus social constructions that might well be otherwise.

This is the difference between economics and political economics, I suppose.

What Kinds of Facts in Social Cognition?

The point of all of this is that there may be two quite different kinds of facts about people at issue in social cognition.

• There are intrinsic facts, such as that the person is 6 feet 2 inches tall, male or female, or active or inactive.  These facts are a matter of physical measurement.
• And then there are observer-dependent facts such as that the person is aggressive or passive, extraverted or introverted, masculine or feminine, intelligent or dull.  These facts are matters of opinion.

Social cognition is a subfield of psychology, and psychology is a science.  Like any other field of science, social cognition seeks objective knowledge of how we understand social reality.  But:

• Some features of social reality are intrinsic, in that they exist independent of the observer.
• Other features of social realty are observer-dependent, in that their existence depends on the observer's attitudes and feelings.
• Other features of social reality are social constructions, in that they exist only in certain social contexts, as products of collective intentionality.

This page last revised 05/12/2014.