social construct

American  

[soh-shuhl kon-struhkt] / ˈsoʊ ʃəl ˈkɒn strʌkt /

noun

1. a complex concept or practice shared by a society or group, not arising from any natural or innate source but built on the assumptions upheld, usually tacitly, by its members.

   The Green Party supports the EU in viewing disability as a social construct and recognizes the well-established link between poverty and disability.

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Etymology

Origin of social construct

First recorded in 1900–05

Example Sentences

So yeah, I just think people who are in the public eye have an experience inside of a social construct that is so violently unusual.

From Los Angeles Times

One way to reconcile the cognitive dissonance is to accept that gender roles are a social construct and, actually, it’s okay if women want to be firefighters and men want to be manicurists.

From Salon

Beatty’s cascading, relentless prose conjures a world in which the ridiculousness of race as a social construct leads to high absurdity.

From Los Angeles Times

RaMell’s intuition that the best way of presenting the lives of Black people in a film would be to let viewers experience them, insofar as was possible, felt smart to me, especially if we agree that race is a social construct manufactured by design.

From Los Angeles Times

A social construct that we created to inventory passing days in a way that would best make sense to us when time, in and of itself, is more fluid.

From Salon