7.2 The Social Construction of Reality

We have seen that our great reliance on social learning, and our susceptibility to concepts that are brought to mind, make us very open to social influence. Considered from the cultural perspective, these two forms of social influence play a large role in how people are socialized as children into a cultural worldview (see chapter 2). The title of sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s 1967 book The Social Construction of Reality nicely captures the point. Many of our beliefs, attitudes, values, and behaviors are taught to us in the first years of our life, when we are virtually totally dependent on our parents for sustenance, security, and knowledge. As we mature, educational, religious, and social institutions further reinforce our own culture’s way of viewing the world. The version of the cultural worldview we have internalized over the course of childhood becomes a form of social influence that is both profound and largely taken for granted. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it this way:

The great Fundamental . . . doctrines . . . are . . . taught so early, under such circumstances, and in such close and vital association with whatever makes or marks reality for our infant minds, that the words ever after represent sensations, feelings, vital assurances, sense of reality—rather than thoughts, or any distinct conception. Associated, I had almost said identified, with the parental Voice, Look, Touch, with the living warmth and pressure of the Mother on whose lap the Child is first made to kneel, within whose palms its little hands are folded, and the motion of whose eyes its eyes follow and imitate—(yea, what the blue sky is to the Mother, the Mother’s upraised Eyes and Brow are to the Child, the Type and Symbol of an invisible Heaven!)—from within and without, these great First Truths, these good and gracious Tidings, these holy and humanizing Spells, in the preconformity to which our very humanity may be said to consist, are so infused, that it were but a tame and inadequate expression to say, we all take them for granted. (Coleridge & Fenby, 1825/1877, p. 207).

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From this cultural worldview, we learn scripts for how to behave in different situations and different social roles.

Culturally Defined Social Situations

For an illustration of the influence of culturally defined situations, think of instances in which the norm is to be quiet. You may have come up with these: a library, a tennis match, or a funeral. But this same norm doesn’t apply at a playground, a hockey game, or a wedding reception. As a child, you had to learn which norms apply in which situations, but once you’ve internalized those rules, you don’t need to decide consciously to be quiet or loud. Instead, the context itself automatically activates the norm, which then guides your behavior.

To demonstrate this, Aarts and Dijksterhuis (2003) presented participants with a picture of a library or a train station and told them they would be going to that location later in the session. A third group was shown a library but had no expectation of going to a library. Participants then had to make judgments in a lexical decision task (a task in which participants have to decide whether a presented string of letters is a word or a nonword). Only the group that expected to be going to a library showed evidence of activating the concept of silence. Specifically, they were faster than either of the other groups to recognize silence-related words as being actual words. In a second study, participants who expected to go to a library also pronounced words more softly in what they thought was an unrelated communication task. For them, the anticipation of entering a library automatically activated a norm of being quiet that then affected their speaking volume even before they left the lab!

Think ABOUT

[© PHOVOIR/Alamy]

As you read this, what also might come to mind are the instances when people break social norms. Have you ever been studying at the library when someone walked in, talking loudly to a friend? From such casual observations, it is clear that some individuals are more likely to toe the line than others. Some seem to go out of their way to break every norm they can think of, whereas others seem to follow norms as if their very lives depended on it. Most of us fall somewhere in between. How do these tendencies end up affecting behavior? Does everyone activate the same norms, but the nonconformists merely ignore these cues? Or do they not activate the norms in the first place? Although it’s probably a little of both, some research suggests that nonconformists show less automatic activation of norms. Consider the library study we just described. Aarts and colleagues (2003) followed up on this study and showed that nonconformists (those who responded on a questionnaire that adhering to social norms was not that important to them and that they didn’t always try to do so) were less likely even to activate a concept of silence when expecting to visit a library. If people don’t have the goal of fitting in, situations might not have the same power to activate norms that influence their behavior.

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Culturally Defined Social Roles

The Stanford Prison Experiment Video on LaunchPad

FIGURE 7.1

The Stanford prison experiment
With ordinary people randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards, the Stanford prison study provides a chilling demonstration of the power of social roles.
[Philip G. Zimbardo, Inc.]

Can the power of social roles help to explain the events at Abu Ghraib?
[AP Photo]

Along with learning social situations, at an early age we also learn social roles and generalized beliefs, or stereotypes, associated with those roles. We learn about being female and being male in our society, about doctors, lawyers, nurses, firefighters, basketball players, and so forth. This knowledge is transmitted by our parents, by experiences with people in these roles, and in large part by books, television, movies, and the Internet. When we are subsequently placed in such a role, we tend to enact fairly elaborate schemas to fulfill the particular role.

This adherence to social roles was most vividly illustrated in one of the most famous of all social psychology experiments, the Stanford prison experiment. Philip Zimbardo and colleagues (Haney et al., 1973) used newspaper ads to recruit young men. The researchers created a mock prison in the basement of a building on the campus of Stanford University. They randomly assigned half the young men to be guards and the other half to be prisoners. Guards were given prison-guard-style uniforms, whistles, and nightsticks. Prisoners were dressed in loose-fitting, inmate-style clothing (see FIGURE 7.1). Zimbardo essentially served as prison warden and gave the “guards” some basic instructions and routines to follow in maintaining the incarceration of the “prisoners.” Within days, the guards were treating the prisoners poorly, inflicting punishments that bordered on sadistic. Meanwhile, the prisoners either became rebellious or fell into bouts of depression. The effects were so powerful that this famous experiment actually never was completed! Although it was planned to last two weeks, it had to be stopped after only six days for the sake of the participants’ well-being.

Keep in mind that participants were randomly assigned to be guards or prisoners, meaning that we cannot conclude that the guards acted the way they did simply because they were inherently sadistic or that the prisoners were inherently submissive. Rather, their behavior was due to their assigned roles. There is no way to determine how much of this impact was a result of the self-perception and self-justifying dissonance processes activated by fulfilling the basic requirements of these roles, and how much was determined by enactment of cultural schemas for these roles. It was probably a combination of both types of processes. Regardless, the conclusion we can draw is that clearly the roles and associated trappings and routines profoundly altered the behavior of both the guards and the prisoners, attesting to the power of culturally defined roles to alter attitudes and behavior. Zimbardo (2007) and others have noted clear parallels between what he found in his experiment and phenomena such as the well-publicized abuses of detainees by American soldiers in the Iraqi detention center known as Abu Ghraib during the American occupation of Iraq.

In light of this research and what we know from anthropology and cross-cultural psychology, it is indisputable that many of our concepts of situations and roles, beliefs about right and wrong, and views of historical and current events are influenced by the cultural milieu in which we were raised and in which we live. But does this social influence truly extend to the basic ways we perceive the world? Starting way back in the 1930s, pioneering work on how conformity influences perception suggests that it does.

Face The Rear Video on LaunchPad

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SECTION review: The Social Construction of Reality

The Social Construction of Reality
Our cultural worldview is a profound form of social influence that we often take for granted.
Culturally defined social situations
  • Cultures prescribe particular norms for particular situations.
  • These norms influence our behavior as the situation activates associated schemas when and if we are motivated to fit in with others.
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    Culturally defined social roles

  • Similarly, our cultures teach us the generalized beliefs that accompany particular roles.
  • The Zimbardo prison experiment demonstrated that these roles can contribute to particularly distasteful forms of behavior.

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