Understanding Social Facts: Definition and Examples
What are Social Facts?
The term “social facts” is often used to describe almost all phenomena within society, even those with limited collective interest. However, if all facts were social, sociology would lose its distinct focus and overlap with biology and psychology.
Social facts are defined as ways to act, to think, and to feel that exist outside of individual consciences. These behaviors and thoughts are not only external to the individual but also possess an imperative and coercive power, imposing themselves whether one likes it or not. Public awareness, through its vigilance over citizens’ conduct and its means of suppressing offensive acts, reinforces these facts. For example: If one’s attire disregards the customs of their country and social class, it provokes laughter and exclusion, producing a similar effect to a formal punishment. While one isn’t forced to speak the same language or use the same currency as their compatriots, it’s practically impossible to do otherwise.
We are faced with a unique order of events:
Ways of acting and thinking that are external to the individual, endowed with a power of coercion. These cannot be confused with organic phenomena, as they consist of representations and actions, nor with psychical phenomena, which exist only within individual consciousness. They constitute a new species, with society, not the individual, as their substrate.
It is now widely accepted that most of our ideas and tendencies are not self-generated but come from external sources, imposing themselves upon us. Thus, we suffer social facts (ways of seeing, feeling, and acting which do not arise spontaneously). Beliefs, trends, and practices of a group collectively constitute social facts.
In Summary
A social fact is any way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exerting external constraint on the individual, or, alternatively, that is general throughout a given society, while also possessing an existence of its own, independent of individual manifestations.