Social fact

In sociology, social facts are the values, cultural norms, and social structures which transcend the individual and are capable of exercising social control.

French sociologist Émile Durkheim defined the term and argued that the discipline of Sociology should be understood as the empirical study of social facts. For Durkheim, social facts "consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him".

In The Rules of Sociological Method Durkheim laid out a theory of sociology as "the science of social facts". He considered social facts to "consist of representations and actions" which meant that "they cannot be confused with organic phenomena, nor with psychical phenomena, which have no existence save in and through the individual consciousness." Durkheim says that a social fact is a thing that many people do very similarly because the socialized community that they belong to has influenced them to do these things.

Durkheim defined the social fact in the following way:

Examples of social facts for Durkheim were social institutions such as kinship and marriage, currency, language, religion, political organization and all the other institutions of society that require that we take them into account in our everyday interactions with other members of our societies. Deviating from the norms of such institutions makes the individual unacceptable or misfit in the group.

Among the most noted of Durkheim's work was his discovery of the "social fact" of suicide rates. By carefully examining police suicide statistics in different districts, Durkheim was able to demonstrate that the suicide rate of Catholic communities is lower than that of Protestant communities. He ascribed this to a social (as opposed to individual) cause. This was considered groundbreaking and remains influential even today.

Durkheim's discovery of social facts was seen as significant because it promised to make it possible to study the behavior of entire societies, rather than just of particular individuals. Durkheim points to individual actions as instances or representations of different types of actions in society. Some contemporary, interpretivist, sociologists like Max Atkinson and Jack Douglas refer to Durkheim's studies for two quite different purposes, however:

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