Social reality refers to a socially constructed perspective of the world, consisting of the accepted social tenets of a community involving laws and social representations. It is distinct from the material reality, biological reality or individual cognitive reality, representing as it does on a subjective level created through social interaction and thereby transcending individual motives and actions. Radical constructivism would cautiously describe social reality as the product of uniformities among observers (whether or not including the current observer themselves).

The problem of social reality has been treated exhaustively by philosophers in the phenomenological tradition, particularly Alfred Schütz, who used the term "social world" to designate this distinct level of reality. Within the social world, Schütz distinguished between social reality that could be experienced directly (umwelt) and a social reality beyond the immediate horizon, which could yet be experienced if sought out. In his wake, ethnomethodology explored further the unarticulated structure of our everyday competence and ability with social reality.

Previously, the subject had been addressed in sociology as well as other disciplines. For example, Émile Durkheim stressed the distinct nature of "the social kingdom. Here more than anywhere else the idea is the reality". Herbert Spencer had coined the term super-organic to distinguish the social level of reality above the biological and psychological.

John Searle has used the theory of speech acts to explore the nature of social/institutional reality, so as to describe such aspects of social reality which he instances under the rubrics of "marriage, property, hiring, firing, war, revolutions, cocktail parties, governments, meetings, unions, parliaments, corporations, laws, restaurants, vacations, lawyers, professors, doctors, medieval knights, and taxes, for example".

Searle argued that such institutional realities interact with each other in what he called "systematic relationships (e.g., governments, marriages, corporations, universities, armies, churches)" to create a multi-layered social reality.

For Searle, language was the key to the formation of social reality because "language is precisely designed to be a self-identifying category of institutional facts"; i.e., a system of publicly and widely accepted symbols which "persist through time independently of the urges and inclinations of the participants."

There is a debate in social theory about whether social reality exists independently of people's involvement with it, or whether (as in social constructionism) it is only created by the human process of ongoing interaction.

Peter L. Berger argued for a new concern with the basic process of the social construction of reality. Berger stated that the social construction of reality was a process made up of three steps: externalization, objectivation and internalization. In similar fashion, post-Sartrians like R. D. Laing stress that, "once certain fundamental structures of experience are shared, they come to be experienced as objective entities...they take on the force and character of partial autonomous realities, with their own way of life". Yet at the same time, Laing insisted that such a socially real grouping "can be nothing else than the multiplicity of the points of view and actions of its members...even where, through the interiorization of this multiplicity as synthesized by each, this synthesized multiplicity becomes ubiquitous in space and enduring in time".