Human behavior is, to a large extent, socially constructed. People often act based on social norms, expectations, or habits rather than by attempting to ascertain the nature of reality itself. In that context, it is true to say that people’s perceptions of reality are socially constructed, as explained by the Thomas theorem:
Another way of looking at this concept is through W.I. Thomas’s notable Thomas theorem which states, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 1928). That is, people’s behavior can be determined by their subjective construction of reality rather than by objective reality.
In “Praxeology: The Methodology of Austrian Economics,” Murray Rothbard defines praxeology as “the logical implications of the universal formal fact that people act, that they employ means to try to attain chosen ends.” People attempt to make decisions based on their best evaluation of the reality of the situation. If we have a good grasp of that reality, our decisions are likely to lead toward our goals; a weak grasp of reality is likely to yield disastrous decisions. Rothbard observes that “all that praxeology asserts is that the individual actor adopts goals and believes, whether erroneously or correctly, that he can arrive at them by the employment of certain means” (emphasis added). Our perception of reality may be erroneous or correct. When we fall into error, we do our best to review and correct our perception of reality in order to make better decisions in the future. This commonsense principle is reflected in the popular slogan FAFO: “FAFO is an acronym for ‘eff around and find out.’ It’s a cheeky way to tell people that if they play with fire, they might get burned—or to announce that they already have been.”
The commonsense view that our decisions are influenced by cultural and social norms is often overstated to convey the mistaken idea that there is no such thing as objective reality: reality itself is a social construct that depends on how you perceive or define it. This partly reflects a form of recklessness—abandoning the effort to investigate or distinguish true from false—sometimes because inquiry is deemed too costly and sometimes from a desire to avoid interpersonal or intergroup conflict by proclaiming that everyone is correct. It suits the egalitarian ethos of our time to declare that everyone has the right answer. I have “my truth,” and you have yours. In mathematics, teachers have been urged to be inclusive by teaching pupils that there are no right or wrong answers.
Hellbound and Down 