What Is a Social Construct? Human Nature, Money and the Batman Slap

Last updated: October 19, 2026

A social construct is something that exists because people collectively treat it as existing: money, borders, marriage, a company, the rules of chess. Take away the shared practices and the thing disappears, even though few people would call it imaginary while it is around. The phrase was popularised by the sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality (1966), and the philosopher John Searle, a firm realist about the physical world, later gave one of the most influential accounts of how social facts work, with a formula quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “X counts as Y in C”. A printed piece of paper counts as money in a given country. It sounds thin, and Searle thinks a large share of the economy, the law and your passport rests on it.

The meme takes the term into a fight it frequently ends up in. Robin starts to say “but human nature…” and Batman slaps him mid-sentence with “SOCIAL CONSTRUCT!” Anyone who has spent time in a seminar or a comment section knows both characters. The joke works because the slap does the arguing. Sometimes Batman has a point. Sometimes Robin was about to say something interesting, and now nobody gets to hear it.

A Definition You Can Actually Use

To call something a social construct is to say that it depends on human practices, agreements or ideas, rather than existing in the world independently of us. “Human construct” is often used in the same sense.

The SEP entry by Ron Mallon states the core idea as a relation, “X socially constructs Y”: some object or kind is grounded in, caused, constituted or controlled by social or cultural factors rather than natural ones. The formula is loose because the label gets stuck on at least three different claims. Some things exist only because of social practices, like money or a parliament. Some categories are drawn by us, like the line between a “hill” and a “mountain”, even though the land itself is there either way. And some traits are shaped by social causes, like table manners or the accent you speak with. A great deal of shouting in this area comes from people defending one of these claims while their opponent attacks another.

The idea is a lot older than the culture war it now gets dragged into. Berger and Luckmann argued that people who interact over time develop habits, turn those habits into institutions that others can step into, and then justify the institutions with stories and rules until the result feels like the natural order of things. In a member survey for its 1998 World Congress, the International Sociological Association found their book ranked fifth among the twentieth-century books most influential on sociologists’ work. The point that made it influential is in the title: what we experience as plain reality includes a large share of things we keep up together.

Money Is Made Up, and Your Rent Is Still Due

The best example of a social construct is also the strongest argument that “constructed” does not mean “fake”. A banknote is paper, and yet it can buy you lunch, because enough people accept that it counts as money.

Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality (1995) explains how that works. Some facts are brute facts: a rock has a certain mass whether or not anyone agrees. Others are institutional facts, which exist because we collectively accept that something has a status it could not have by its physical properties alone. The SEP entry on social ontology summarises the mechanism: humans impose “status functions” on objects through collective acceptance, following constitutive rules of the form “X counts as Y in C”, and those statuses come with rights and duties. Paper printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing counts as money in the United States; a line of stones counts as a border in a village. Searle adds a twist that Mallon’s entry quotes nicely: “Part of being a cocktail party is being thought to be a cocktail party.”

The classic illustration is a 100-dollar bill. Nobody believes the paper is worth 100 dollars as paper. Everyone agrees it can be exchanged for goods worth 100 dollars, and that agreement is backed by laws, banks and tax authorities that will happily remind you of its reality.

“Constructed” Does Not Mean “Unreal”, but It Can Mean “Could Be Otherwise”

What social construction claims usually add is not that something is unreal, but that it is not inevitable. It could have been different, and it might change.

The philosopher Ian Hacking made this the centre of his book The Social Construction of What? (1999). On his analysis, the basic constructionist claim about X is that “X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is” (as quoted in MIT course notes), that it is not determined by the nature of things. Hacking added a distinction that clears up many arguments. Some kinds are “indifferent”: quarks are not affected by being classified as quarks. Others are “interactive”: people can become aware of how they are classified and change their behaviour in response, which in turn changes the category. Hacking calls this the looping effect. A psychiatric diagnosis, a school label or an ethnic category can shape the very people it describes.

Being constructed does not make something weak. Philosophers such as Sally Haslanger defend what the SEP describes as a constructionism on which race is real, even though it is not grounded in biological facts. In Haslanger’s own account, races are social positions of privilege and subordination tied to perceived ancestry. That is why, for her, calling race a construct explains its force rather than denying it, and why the political goal is to end those hierarchies. Our post on race as a social construct goes further into this.

So Is Human Nature a Social Construct?

Partly, and partly it is in your genes. Twin studies show that many human traits are substantially heritable, while history keeps showing how often a society’s idea of “natural” turns out to be its own habits. Robin and Batman each have a piece of this, which is annoying for both of them.

Robin’s half first. A meta-analysis by Tinca Polderman and colleagues in Nature Genetics (2015), covering fifty years of twin studies, 17,804 traits and about 14.5 million partly overlapping twin pairs, found that “across all traits the reported heritability is 49%”. Heritability is easy to misread: it describes how much of the variation within a particular population, in its particular environment, is linked to genetic differences, not how fixed a trait is in an individual. But it is hard to square with the idea that people arrive as blank slates written on entirely by culture, which was the target of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate (2002).

Batman, meanwhile, has philosophers of biology in his corner. The SEP entry on human nature explains that because species lack essences, in the sense of necessary and sufficient conditions for membership, a number of philosophers following David Hull have denied that there is any such thing as human nature in the old essentialist sense, while others have rebuilt the concept without essences. It also notes that the notion of the normal “is frequently employed to exclude and oppress”. When people say “it’s just human nature”, they often mean “it’s how we do things around here”, and history keeps showing how local “here” was.

The supermarket offers a neat illustration of how tangled the two halves are. Broccoli, cabbage, kale and cauliflower all belong to the same species, Brassica oleracea, and as the University of Florida’s gardening extension explains, they were bred from the wild plant by people choosing what to grow. Broccoli is entirely biological, and it exists in its current form because humans wanted it to. On this picture, much of human nature is more broccoli than quark: real biology, shaped by what people kept choosing.

Gender, and Why the Slap Gets Loudest Here

“Is gender a social construct?” is the most heated version of the question, and the answer depends on which claim the person asking has in mind: that gender roles and expectations are shaped by society, which the SEP entry on sex and gender treats as the common way of talking today, or that bodily sex differences are themselves socially made, which is far more controversial.

The best-known constructionist account comes from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), which argued that gender is something done rather than something one simply has. The SEP quotes her claim that “the gendered body is performative”: gender is constituted through repeated acts that follow social norms, often without anyone noticing that they are following anything. Butler went further than most: in the same book she suggested that “sex” might be as culturally constructed as gender, which places her on the stronger side of the debate. The everyday evidence for the weaker claim is easy to find. In June 1918 a trade publication called Infant’s Department advised that “the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl”, the reverse of today’s convention, although Smithsonian reports that later research treats such excerpts as anomalies rather than proof of a widespread reversal. Colour codes, clothing and the rituals around a baby’s sex are obvious candidates for “could have been otherwise”.

The stronger claims are where critics push back, including feminist philosophers who question Butler’s account, and the same SEP entry says plainly that there is no consensus on these issues. This is where Hacking’s book title earns its keep: the social construction of what? The idea of “woman”, the roles assigned to women, the statistics about women and individual bodies are different things, and the answer can differ for each. We are not going to settle it in a blog post attached to a shirt shop. Pulling the claims apart at least means people can disagree about the same thing.

When Batman Should Put His Hand Down

“Social construct” is a good idea that has turned into a reflex, and the people most careful about it are often its own theorists.

Philosophers who take the idea seriously insist on asking what exactly is being constructed. Hacking’s book separates the idea of child abuse, a social product, from child abuse itself, which, as the book’s description puts it, is very much a reality. Mallon’s SEP entry also reports a standard objection to the global version: if every fact were socially constructed, the facts about our constructing would need constructing too, and the regress never ends. The philosopher Paul Boghossian, as the same entry reports, put the realist objection as a question: isn’t it “part of the very concept of an electron” that electrons were not constructed by us? Back to the meme: “human nature” gets used to shut down talk about things that could change, and “social construct” gets used to shut down talk about things that might not. Both phrases can work as a slap. The better move, for both of them, is to say which thing is constructed, by whom, and what would change if we stopped constructing it.

For a closer look at one of the most consequential social constructs, read Race: It’s a Social Construct, But It Matters.