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.
Psychologists
Solomon Asch
Polish-American Gestalt social psychologist (1907-1996). His 1951 conformity studies showed that over a third of subjects went along with a wrong majority. His 1946 paper named warm/cold as central traits in impression.
View this figure's profile
Solomon Asch's Other Quotes
The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern.
The presence of a supporting partner depleted the majority of much of its power. Its pressure on the individual was reduced to one fourth.
Independence and conformity were the two main attitudes toward the majority pressure, and most subjects exhibited some of each.
To know a person is to have a grasp of a particular structure.
Related Quotes
The true is the whole.
-- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The available data fail to support the hypothesis that psychotherapy facilitates recovery from neurotic disorder.
-- Hans Eysenck
We choose freedom.
-- Konrad Adenauer
The whole is something else than the sum of its parts.
-- Wolfgang Köhler
To know a person is to have a grasp of a particular structure.
-- Solomon Asch
Too much of social psychology consists of experiments in a vacuum.
-- Henri Tajfel