social constructivism
the school of thought that recognizes knowledge as embedded in social context and sees human thoughts, feelings, language, and behavior as the result of interchanges with the external world. Social constructivism argues that there is no separation between subjectivity and objectivity and that the dichotomy between the person and the situation is false: The person is intimately and intricately bound within social, cultural, and historical forces and cannot be understood fully without consideration of these social forces. According to social constructivism, not only knowledge but reality itself is created in an interactive process and thus people are solely what their society shapes them to be.