Jawn Lam

Solomon E. Asch

Thinkers1907 to 1996Social psychologist

Works

  • Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments, chapter in Groups, Leadership and Men, edited by Harold Guetzkow, 1951
  • Studies of Independence and Conformity: I. A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority, Psychological Monographs, 1956

In Tactics of Organizational Politics

Ideas

Conformity to a unanimous majority. Subjects judging which of three lines matched a standard heard a unanimous group of confederates give the same wrong answer on most trials. About a third of responses on those trials went along with the majority, and about three quarters of subjects conformed at least once, though most responses stayed correct and about a quarter of subjects never conformed. Caveat: Textbooks often overstate the result; Asch's own emphasis included the independence most subjects showed. A meta-analysis of 133 line-judgment studies (Bond and Smith, Psychological Bulletin, 1996) found that conformity varies with culture.

The effect of a single dissenter. When one other person in the group gave the correct answer, conformity fell sharply. When that partner later switched to the majority, conformity rose again to the level seen with no partner at all.

What it explains

Asch explains why a room that appears unanimous is hard to oppose, and why the first visible dissenter matters so much: one ally makes independence far easier. It follows that removing or silencing the one person who would break a consensus changes what everyone else is willing to say.

Tactics that draw on Solomon E. Asch (43)

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