I don’t understand how so many people seem to understand the concept just fine. It sounds oddly complicated to me. The concept to me sounds like collectively concluded delusion or like if society collectively concludes something to be objectively real, that means it’s objectively real. Maybe I’m not understanding correctly?
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It’s the idea that things have meanings because society gives them that meaning. It has nothing to do about it being physical or not.
For instance, can you differentiate a table from a stool? Of course you can, but how? By all accounts, they’re essentially the same thing – four legs and a flat top. You can even put stuff on top of the stool while sitting on the table. However, you know to sit on the stool and to eat on the table. How? Because society taught you how to differentiate between the two even if, physically speaking, they’re the exact same.
Eating food is a basic biological need. You can argue that the desire to eat cooked and varied food in a social setting is also biological. Taco Tuesday, that everyone should eat the exact same kind of food on the same night, is a social construct.
Pretty much everything you identify with, outside of your genitals, is a social construct. We create explanations for things in order to be organized.
You being a dude? A social construct. You liking cars? Also a social construct. Because in order to be aware of these things, you first have to be socialized.
At the risk of being downvoted to oblivion…
You’ll hear the term “social construct” used a lot in conjunction with “X studies” conversations- gender studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, etc. It’s a shorthand for the idea that what many people consider essential aspects of our culture – “facts” of life – are in reality things that we have agreed to agree on as a culture. In the context of examining how our culture treats marginalized people the question can be asked, if X thing is something that we agreed is true, what would happen if we agreed something else was true? Abstracting ideas out as social constructs allows us to have a conversation about the value of those ideas without resorting to, “well, that’s just the way it’s always been.”
In the field of Women’s Studies, Elizabeth Spelman’s “Inessential Woman” is a foundational work in the argument that much of what it means to be a woman is a social construct rather than being “essential”, or inherent in the nature of women. That concept has been extended to gender as a whole, with many modern scholars agreeing that many elements of gender are social constructs rather than being inherently linked to biological sex. The same sort of lens has been applied to race, sexual orientation, etc.
TL;DR – social constructs are things we’ve agreed as a society are true.
A social construct is usually used as a contrast against something like an objective fact or truth about the universe. The name spells out what it is – a “social construct” is something that *society* has *constructed*.
Gravity is not a social construct because gravity exists whether or not we decide to believe in it. If we all woke up tomorrow and decided that gravity didn’t exist, that wouldn’t stop us from dropping off cliffs if we walked over them.
Money is a social construct. If society woke up tomorrow and decided that paper money was worthless for whatever reason, then it *would* be worthless. Society collectively agrees that paper money can be exchanged for goods and services. If society decided tomorrow that paper money was wasteful, or ineffective, and decided to stop honoring it, then paper money would become useless. Nothing about the money *itself* changed – the only thing that changed was how it was seen by society at large.
Here’s the definition Google gives:
>A social construct is a concept that exists not in objective reality, but as a result of human interaction. It exists because humans agree that it exists.
Anything that goes away if humans stop thinking about it.
Language, gender, countries, borders, bank accounts, types of dogs, who can marry who, what goes on a cheeseburger, Christmas, all religions…
If all the humans collectively forgot about it, and that would cause it to no longer exist, then it’s a social construct.
What’s not a social construct? Rocks, water, air, the moon. Those still exist even if all the humans forgot about them.
Simply put, it’s a pattern.
Humans are creatures that crave patterns, it’s wired into us as a tool our brain used to survive. Patterns is what allowed us to hunt together, produce together, and innovate together.
So what happens is we then also identify the patterns societies engage in. Especially today many feel that these patterns were intentionally crafted, a form of social conspiracy theory, but the fact is any large society will automatically develop rituals, customs, and norms over time and the patterns these create will be “social constructs”
Imagine we decided to sort people above 6 foot tall as “tallies” and people below as “shorties”. Then we made separate clubs, bathrooms, etc for each group.
The group is an observable. You can measure height. It has physical meaning. But it only exists as a group because we made it that way.
Height is a physical thing but our choice to sort based on height is a social construct.
You can apply this to any grouping of people. It’s all somewhat arbitrary.
If you do this analysis enough times you realize all forms of categorization are social constructs.
I mean you got it pretty right in your post. So if you intuited that meaning from the word, that explains how everyone else seems to understand it as well
To say something is a social construct isn’t to say it doesn’t exist. Sports are my favorite example of a social construct. People got together and made up rules and did those rules and now a sport exists. Sports certainly exist, people bond over them, professional athletes dedicate their lives to them, and a LOT of money changes hands about it. At the same time when people agree to it, sports can be changed, rules can be changed and they can cease to exist if people stop knowing them and doing them. The same thing is true of more important stuff like money. Sure money physically exists, but how much it’s worth for instance is a construct. The American penny costs twice as much to make as it is worth because society said so.
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