CHAPTER 3
BUILDING REALITY:
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE

Macro-Micro Connection

Constructing Reality in Stages

Sociologists see society as a human creation. One interesting question is how the people in a society develop the common perceptions of reality that give them a basis for social interaction. According to some symbolic interactionists, social reality is developed in three stages: externalization, objectivation, and internalization.1

Thinking in terms of stages does not imply that the creation of reality occurs in a neat progression. Instead, the stages provide a general understanding of how the knowledge that guides our conduct is established and how it becomes a part of culture and common sense.

Externalization

The stage at which people construct a piece of cultural knowledge about some aspect of the world is called externalization. The process may be formal, as when sociologists develop systematic "theories" to explain a social phenomenon. Or it may be informal, as when someone suggests an explanation for why people act the way they do.

Think of externalization as a sort of "fact marketing" by which certain people try to "sell" a particular explanation of some social phenomenon to the rest of us. They publish, broadcast, or explain ideas, giving the ideas a form that the rest of us can understand.

For instance, until the late 18th century, chronic drunkenness was commonly associated with demonic possession, weak will, or sin.2 Today, alcoholism is recognized as a disease by the medical community and the general public. This shift in knowledge didn't occur on its own. Real peopleóphysicians, psychiatrists, and scholarsóoffered enough compelling theories and evidence about the nature of chronic drunkenness that the public was eventually swayed to look at things another way.

Within academic disciplines like sociology, externalized explanations for social events are usually subjected to intense peer scrutiny and research to determine their validity. In everyday life, however, externalized explanations may be accepted as "the way things are" simply because of the perceived expertise, insight, or authority of the individual providing the information.

The important point about externalization is that all our ideas about why certain things happen were fashioned at some point by human beings.

Objectivation

Externalization leads to the second and most crucial stage of reality construction. Objectivation occurs when the "facts" that were originally someone's ideas, speculations, or theories take on an objective reality of their own, independent of the people who first created (externalized) them.3

It has become a self-evident "fact" in the minds of most Americans that alcoholism is, and always was, an illness. As this fact becomes part of the public consciousness and is given life and reinforced in day-to-day conversation, we collectively forget that somebody or some group initially thought it up. The idea becomes a reality that has always existed but was just waiting to be discovered. It becomes what "everybody knows" to be true.

The problem, however, is that ideas are sometimes communicated, externalized, and accepted as truth by the public without any connection between the objectified knowledge and hard facts.

We have all heard the stories of Halloween trick-or-treaters receiving apples filled with razor blades or candy mixed with pins. Each year parents are warned not to let their children eat anything that is unwrapped or homemade. Schools train children to inspect treats for signs of tampering. Hospitals, police stations, and other municipal offices in some cities make themselves available to examine candy free of charge. California and New Jersey have passed specific laws against food tampering, and some communities have tried to ban trick-or-treating. A 1985 ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 60% of parents who planned to allow their children to go trick-or-treating were afraid of tainted candy.4 "Halloween sadism" has altered the meaning of Halloween and become a symbol for all that is wrong with today's society.

The hard facts are, however, that only two child deaths have been attributed to Halloween sadism. In both these cases the treats were tainted by members of the child's family. Further investigations have concluded that the vast majority of reports have been hoaxes.5 We are left with an objectified reality that has become an established part of our culture with little if any verifiable support.

Sometimes inaccurate social research becomes objectified, exerting a powerful impact on the entire society.

In 1995, several research organizations reported that a large proportion of teen-age mothersóas many as 65%óhad babies by adult men. The image of older men preying on troubled young girls prompted several states to step up their enforcement of statutory rape laws, to protect young girls from lecherous old men and to prevent out-of-wedlock births.

What the reports neglected to mention, however, was that the majority of teen-age mothers were 18 or 19 years old themselves and were therefore, like the fathers, adults. In addition, the reports failed to distinguish between married and single teen-agers. Subsequent studies determined that of all those between 15 and 17 who gave birth, only 8% were unmarried girls made pregnant by men more than five years older.6

Similarly, in the mid-1980s the Department of Health and Human Services estimated that 1.5 million children are reported missing each year. It didn't take long for the federal government to launch a national campaign that included pictures of missing children on milk cartons and learning programs in schools and on television instructing kids how to avoid being kidnapped.

However, more rigorous studies found that only about 4,000 children are abducted by strangers each year.7 Such a figure is certainly cause for alarm, but it is dwarfed by the more than 350,000 children taken by a parent in custody disputes each year. And it is nowhere near the original estimate of 1.5 million.

In the process of objectifying distorted pieces of information, the reporting of statistics like these feed our collective fears and become a taken-for-granted part of the national dialogue on serious social problems.

Internalization

The process through which people learn the objectified "facts" of a culture and make them a part of their own internal consciousness is internalization. Through the ordinary process of socialization, children acquire knowledge without personally going through externalization and objectivation. As a particular fact is taught to succeeding generations, it becomes further entrenched into the cultural reality.

To a child who hasn't yet been fully socialized, certain "facts" about the world that are taken for granted by adults make little sense. For instance, one study examined the reading tests used by the state of California, which presented a word and a series of three pictures.8 Children taking the tests were told to mark the picture that "goes best" with the word. In one item, the word fly was followed by pictures of an elephant, a bird, and a dog.

Many of the first-grade children marked the picture of the elephant. From an internalized, socially agreed-upon reality, they were clearly wrong. But their answers made perfect sense from the children's perspective:

They were all familiar with the Disney character Dumbo, the flying elephant.

What was considered incorrect and a sign of incompetence from one perspective could be seen as accurate, even insightful, from another. We can sometimes glimpse the extent to which we adults have internalized a certain reality by observing children's thought patterns.

1 Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. 1966. The social construction of reality. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
2 Conrad, P., & Schneider, J. W. 1980. Deviance and medicalization: From badness to sickness. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby.
3 Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. 1966. The social construction of reality. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
4 Best, J. 1990. Threatened children: Rhetoric and concern about child-victims. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
5 Best, J. 1990. Threatened children: Rhetoric and concern about child-victims. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
6 Cited in Holmes, S. A. 1997. "It's awful! It's terrible! It's...never mind." New York Times, July 6.
7 Cited in Holmes, S. A. 1997. "It's awful! It's terrible! It's...never mind." New York Times, July 6.
8 Mehan, H., & Wood, H. 1975. The reality of ethnomethodology. New York: Wiley.