CLARIFYING Social Construct

I noticed a few of you have been using the idea of a social construct a bit too generally. Here is the definition again:

A social construction (social construct) is a concept or practice which may appear to be natural and obvious to those who accept it, but in reality is an invention or artifact of a particular culture or society. Social constructs are generally understood to be the by-products (often unintended or unconscious) of countless human choices rather than laws resulting from divine will or nature.

People never see social constructs from an emic point of view. The insider never can see it. Like the fish never sees the water or humans never think about air. It's taken for granted. The etic view, the participant observer, the outsider (even insiders can become outsiders to their own culture from travel, migration, going away to college, etc.) the begin to see how people in a culture accept the invention as natural and obvious.

Anthropologists use interviewing inside of participant-observation to "expose the way in which a particular belief has been shaped by social forces" (Writes philosopher Paul A. Boghossian in WHAT IS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION? philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1153/socialconstruction.pdf).

For instance, how did we/you learn the belief that North is up. One social force impacting that view was colonialism by the British Empire. They created a view through maps emphasizing the upper parts where they were located in their emic view. Reading importance from top to bottom is a social construction. Not all cultures read and have their views correlated that way. Others are equally valid in seeing things differently. "Another society, differing from us only in their social values [their learned ways of thinking, feeling, believing and behaving], would have arrived at a different and incompatible belief [or view]." Boghossian writes further:

There are certainly many things, and facts about them, that are socially constructed in the sense ... : money, citizenship and newspapers, for example. None of these things could have existed without society [or enculturation and acculturation]; and each of them could have been constructed differently had we so chosen

If a belief of ours were shown to be socially constructed ... it would follow that we could abandon it without fear of irrationality [the earth is flat; Muslims are evil; carbohydrates are bad for you; noticing skin color causes racism]

[I]f we have the belief not because there is adequate evidence in its favor but because having it subserves some contingent social purpose [Muslims are evil], then if we happen not to share the social purpose it subserves we ought to be free to reject it.

Much important work has been done ... most significantly, it seems to me, [on the] topics of gender and race. Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1953) and other feminist scholars since, have illuminated the extent to which gender roles are not inevitable but are rather the product of social forces. Anthony Appiah (Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race, 1996, with Amy Gutman) has been particularly forceful in demonstrating that nothing physical or biological corresponds to the racial categories that play a pervasive role in our social lives, that these categories owe their existence more to their social function [stratification of resources and wealth affecting our views of who has wealth, power and prestige] than they do to the scientific evidence.

To clarify and be sure you are clear about what a social construct is, tell me what this says to you. How did you have the idea before reading this and how has it changed? If you get it, you can recreate it in your own words and even give an example back to me as if its yours.