social construction of reality

This week in class we learned about the social construction of reality, which means that the society that we live in influences how we experience the world around us. In class we did a couple of actives  which demostrated this idea, we looked at the difference that people see in spit and saliva. Saliva is completely normal when it is in our mouths, but the second it leaves our mouths as 'spit' people think it's disgusting. Why? It is because our society has created this idea that when saliva leaves our mouths it's gross, but really it's the exact same thing. Also we did an "Abandon ship" activity where we pretended to be 16 random people and we had to vote 7 people off our boat. People voted others off due to their backgrounds, for example I played an elderly women and the reason why I was voted off was because my character was old and had nothing to offer the group for 'survival'. The society there has created a view of what people are and are not capable of, therefore already desiding who was going to stay and who was going to be voted off.