Solomon Asch Quotes

Life in society requires consensus as an indispensable condition. But consensus, to be productive, requires that each individual contribute independently out of of his experience and insight.

The human mind is an organ for the discovery of truths rather than of falsehoods.

most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function.

a psychologist named Solomon Asch conducted a series of now-famous experiments on the dangers of group influence. Asch gathered student volunteers into groups and had them take a vision test. He showed them a picture of three lines of varying lengths and asked questions about how the lines compared with one another: which was longer, which one matched the length of a fourth line, and so on. His questions were so simple that 95 percent of students answered every question correctly. But when Asch planted actors in the groups, and the actors confidently volunteered the same incorrect answer, the number of students who gave all correct answers plunged to 25 percent.

Between 1951 and 1956, just as Osborn was promoting the power of group brainstorming, a psychologist named Solomon Asch conducted a series of now-famous experiments on the dangers of group influence. Asch gathered student volunteers into groups and had them take a vision test. He showed them a picture of three lines of varying lengths and asked questions about how the lines compared with one another: which was longer, which one matched the length of a fourth line, and so on. His questions were so simple that 95 percent of students answered every question correctly. But when Asch planted actors in the groups, and the actors confidently volunteered the same incorrect answer, the number of students who gave all correct answers plunged to 25 percent. That is, a staggering 75 percent of the participants went along with the group’s wrong answer to at least one question.

As Solomon Asch, one of the great psychologists of the twentieth century, once wrote, “We look at a person and immediately a certain impression of his character forms itself in us. A glance, a few spoken words are sufficient to tell us a story about a highly complex matter. We know that such impressions form with remarkable rapidity and with great ease. Subsequent observations may enrich or upset our view, but we can no more prevent its rapid growth than we can avoid perceiving a given visual object or hearing a melody.

Disability scholars Andrienne Asch and Erik Parens, in their seminal discussion of the problem, wrote,'Pre-natal diagnosis reinforces the medical model that disability itself, not societal discrimination against people with disabilities, is the problem to be solved.

I focused our resources on two big goals: spreading empowerment and hope; and fostering debate and engagement. My ideas for the first goal built on what I had learned while studying terrorism and mob violence in Indonesia. I relied on ideas from social network theory, the experiments of the psychologists Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, and Philip Zimbardo, and the Three Degrees of Influence idea, that everything we say or do impacts our friends, our friends’ friends, and even our friends’ friends’ friends.

[...] the social psychologist Solomon Asch has demonstrated that the impulse to conformity leads us to deny our own perceptions. If you’re the only one in a group who recognizes that two lines are of the same length, you’re likely to deceive yourself on purpose, so you can embrace everyone else’s opinion in good faith.

Other classic experiments conducted by social psychologist Solomon Asch show how adults readily adopt the opinion of others in simple tasks, such as matching a line to one of a set of other lines

In How Markets Fail, John Cassidy describes classic psychology experiments conducted by Swarthmore’s Solomon Asch in the 1950s.

People are less aware, however, of another source of divergent beliefs—the fact that the same issue or situation is construed quite differently by different people, even people with the same tastes, values, and orientations. As social psychologist Solomon Asch noted many years ago, differences of opinion between people are not always linked to differences in their “judgment of the object,” but often reflect differences in the very “object of judgment” itself.

Solomon Asch showed that an authority in a lab coat was not even necessary to coax people into going along. He found that if several peers said something that was plainly false, the majority of people would conform and recite an obvious lie.