Organizational Behaviour

Abstract

In a classic 1951 article “Effects of Group Pressure Upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgments,” social psychologist Solomon Asch described his investigations into the ways individuals cope when a group's majority opinion is contrary to the facts of a situation. Asch put lone experimental subjects in rooms with people who had been instructed to give blatantly wrong answers to factual questions—for example, saying a chair was green when it was obviously blue. Only the experimental subjects did not know what was going on. Although a slim majority of subjects retained their independence and reported the facts accurately, a sizable minority of them altered their judgment to match that of the majority. When faced with a group opinion that was obviously wrong, they were not willing to report what they saw. They changed their minds.

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