![]() ![]() Sociologists use the term status to describe the responsibilities and benefits that a person experiences according to their rank and role in society. However, you also play other roles in your life, such as “daughter,” “neighbor,” or “employee.” These various roles are each associated with a different status. Currently, while reading this text, you are playing the role of a student. Roles are patterns of behavior that we recognize in each other that are representative of a person’s social status. (Credit: Jean-Antoine-Theodore Giroust/Wikimedia Commons) Roles and StatusĪs you can imagine, people employ many types of behaviors in day-to-day life. Oedipus’s story illustrates one way in which members of society contribute to the social construction of reality. In going out of his way to avoid his fate, Oedipus inadvertently fulfills it. Oedipus is told by an oracle that he will murder his father and marry his mother. While Americans might recognize a “thumbs up” as meaning “great,” in Germany it would mean “one” and in Japan it would mean “five.” Thus, our construction of reality is influenced by our symbolic interactions.įigure 4.11 The story line of a self-fulfilling prophecy appears in many literary works, perhaps most famously in the story of Oedipus. One has only to learn a foreign tongue to know that not every English word can be easily translated into another language. Interactionists also recognize that language and body language reflect our values. With a theoretical perspective focused on the symbols (like language, gestures, and artifacts) that people use to interact, this approach is interested in how people interpret those symbols in daily interactions. Symbolic interactionists offer another lens through which to analyze the social construction of reality. As banks rarely, if ever, have that much money on hand, the bank does indeed run out of money, fulfilling the customers’ prophecy. Because of this false notion, people run to their bank and demand all of their cash at once. One example he gives is of a “bank run.” Say for some reason, a number of people falsely fear that their bank is soon to be bankrupt. Merton explains that with a self-fulfilling prophecy, even a false idea can become true if it is acted upon. Like Berger and Luckmann in their description of habitualization, Thomas states that our moral codes and social norms are created by “successive definitions of the situation.” This concept is defined by sociologist Robert K. For example, a teenager who is repeatedly given a label-overachiever, player, bum-might live up to the term even though it initially wasn’t a part of his character. That is, people’s behavior can be determined by their subjective construction of reality rather than by objective reality. Thomas’s notable Thomas theorem which states, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 1928). Bear in mind that the institution, while socially constructed, is still quite real.Īnother way of looking at this concept is through W.I. This is an example of the process of institutionalization, the act of implanting a convention or norm into society. In a sense, it exists by consensus, both prior and current. If your school is older than you are, it was created by the agreement of others before you. Society is, in fact, “habit.”įor example, your school exists as a school and not just as a building because you and others agree that it is a school. Not only do we construct our own society but we also accept it as it is because others have created it before us. Habitualization describes how “any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be … performed again in the future in the same manner and with the same economical effort” (Berger and Luckmann 1966). ![]() In it, they argued that society is created by humans and human interaction, which they call habitualization. In 1966 sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote a book called The Social Construction of Reality. Rather than discuss their problems and configurations, we’ll now explore how society came to be and how sociologists view social interaction. Until now, we’ve primarily discussed the differences between societies. In a way, our day-to-day interactions are like those of actors on a stage. Figure 4.10 Who are we? What role do we play in society? According to sociologists, we construct reality through our interactions with others. ![]()
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