Week 4- Social Construction of Reality

This week in Sociology we did a lot of activities involving the idea of social construction of reality, which is the idea that society constructs our idea of things, such as what is wrong versus what is right. One example he used was making a student spit onto a spoon. However, as soon as the spit came out of her mouth, our view on it suddenly changed and we were all pretty grossed out by it, whereas we view it as a good thing in our body. This shows social construction of reality because the society we live in has established that spit is bad when it's outside of your mouth, even though there is no real biological difference between inner spit and outer spit (weird way to put it, I know). Another thing that showed the social construction of reality and what our society values was the Ship activity in which we were all assigned different roles, such as college student or traveling poet, and we all had to decide who should be saved and who shouldn't. After doing this activity, we realized that we favored those that had qualities that our society seems to favor, such as good careers, intelligence and young age. It was interesting to see that we mostly all shared the same opinion about who was a "good person" and who was a "bad person" just based off of their descriptions. During this discussion, I began to think of another example of how a society values different things and I began to think how this is present in my life. I came to thinking about the Stevenson society and culture. Even though it is on a much smaller scale, I think we would all value people that work hard, are very friendly, and take leadership because that is the society we are placed into when we are at Stevenson. This week taught us a lot about the way in which society impacts us and that we truly are shaped by the people and things that occur around us.