Chapter 3
Building Reality: The Social Construction of Knowledge
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.
1Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. 1966. The
social construction of reality. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
2Conrad, P., & Schneider, J. W. 1980. Deviance
and medicalization: From badness to sickness. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby.
3Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. 1966. The
social construction of reality. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
4Best, J. 1990. Threatened children:
Rhetoric and concern about child-victims. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
5Best, J. 1990. Threatened children:
Rhetoric and concern about child-victims. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
6Cited in Holmes, S. A. 1997. "It's awful!
It's terrible! It's...never mind." New York Times, July 6.
7Cited in Holmes, S. A. 1997. "It's awful!
It's terrible! It's...never mind." New York Times, July 6.
8Mehan, H., & Wood, H. 1975. The reality
of ethnomethodology. New York: Wiley.
David Newman and Rebecca Smith.
(Created October 7, 1999). Copyright Pine Forge Press.
http://www.pineforge.com/newman. |