The cultures we belong to affect far more than just our practices and beliefs - they also fundamentally shape how we perceive the world, each other, and ourselves. Many rich theoretical traditions in the social sciences have long emphasized this “socially constructed” nature of our experience. To date, however, insights in this arena have resisted formal specification and modeling. In the first part of this talk, I will show how this historical barrier might be overcome by using complex systems research to theorize how the individual, automatic cognitive processes responsible for reflexive sense-making in situations (i.e. mental representation) will, in social contexts, lead to the emergence of shared social realities and collective cultural dynamics. In the second half of the talk, I will then go on to discuss how this perspective might be used to develop more analytically precise and empirically generative ways of getting at social construction processes in real-world contexts.