Getting the Asch finding right matters for how the entrepreneur understands their own decision-making. The research does not establish that the crowd is always wrong or that independence is always right. It establishes that two distinct mechanisms — genuine information learning and social approval seeking — operate simultaneously in every social influence context, that they are difficult to distinguish from the inside, and that confusing them produces systematic decision distortion.

The dual mechanism: when following the crowd is rational and when it is not

Deutsch and Gerard’s (1955) foundational distinction between informational and normative social influence provides the most practically useful framework for the entrepreneur navigating this question.

Informational social influence is updating one’s view because the group has genuinely better information. This is rational and should occur: the entrepreneur evaluating an unfamiliar regulatory environment who defers to the consensus of lawyers, the investor evaluating a market whose pattern recognition the entrepreneur lacks, the product manager updating toward user research that contradicts their prior hypothesis. In each case, the group has access to information or expertise that makes their view more reliable than the independent assessment. Updating toward it is genuine learning.

Normative social influence is updating one’s view because of the desire to be liked, to avoid rejection, or to signal membership in a valued group. This produces public compliance without private acceptance — the Asch participants who gave the wrong answer knew it was wrong but gave it anyway. In the entrepreneurial context, this is the founder who presents market assumptions they do not believe to investors who hold those assumptions, the leadership team that does not challenge the CEO’s strategic direction because disagreement is socially costly, and the board presentation that organises the data around the conclusion the room wants to reach.

The distortion occurs not because normative social influence always produces wrong conclusions — sometimes the group is right regardless of the mechanism — but because it introduces a systematic bias toward consensus that has no relationship to the accuracy of that consensus. The founder’s job is to identify which mechanism is operating, which is substantially harder than it sounds.

Why identifying the mechanism from the inside is so difficult

The Asch post-interview data is the most practically important output of the research for this purpose. Participants who had conformed described feeling doubt and discomfort — but they also described experiencing their compliance as genuine belief, not as strategic performance. They had not consciously decided to say the wrong answer; they had experienced the group’s unanimous confidence as updating their own perception. Conforming felt like believing.

This is the feature of normative social influence that makes it so commercially consequential: it does not feel like a social approval decision. It feels like a judgment update. The founder who changes their view after a negative investor meeting does not experience themselves as managing social approval; they experience themselves as taking legitimate feedback seriously. The mechanism that drove the update — whether genuine information or social discomfort — is not available to direct introspection.

Berns et al.’s (2005) fMRI research established the neurological underpinning. When participants conformed to a wrong group judgment, activity changed in brain regions handling perception and value — the conformity was registered as a perceptual update, not as a strategic social decision. Choosing to maintain an independent view in the face of group pressure activated regions associated with emotional discomfort and conflict monitoring. Independence has a measurable neural cost: it is not merely intellectually demanding but emotionally and physiologically costly to override the social pressure that conformity would relieve.

The practical diagnostic

Given that the mechanism is not reliably available to introspection, the most useful approach is structural rather than psychological. Two questions, asked before updating a position in response to social pressure, reduce the distortion rate without requiring accurate self-knowledge about which mechanism is operating.

First: what is the specific information or evidence that the group possesses that I do not? If the answer is specific, credible, and relevant — investors have seen fifty comparable companies fail at this stage, users have demonstrated this specific behaviour in research — the update is informational and appropriate. If the answer is vague — they seemed very confident, everyone seemed to agree — the update is more likely normative.

Second: would I hold this position if the people I respect held the opposite view? If the honest answer is yes, the position has informational support independent of the social context. If the honest answer is no — if the position depends on who is in the room — the update is primarily normative.

The dissenter effect and its structural implication

Moscovici’s (1980) minority influence research established that a consistent, confident, behaviourally committed minority can shift the majority’s position over time — not through superior information alone but through the consistency that signals strong grounds for the position. The mechanism is the consistency principle: the minority’s refusal to yield prompts the majority to re-examine their own view, because persistent non-compliance under pressure signals that the minority has considered the evidence carefully rather than simply failing to understand the consensus.

For the entrepreneur holding an independent view against investor or market consensus, this is directly relevant: consistent, confident maintenance of the independent position is not merely defensive. It is a genuine persuasive act that can shift the consensus over time.

The dissenter effect extends this finding to group structure. When Asch introduced a single confederate who agreed with the participant against the majority, conformity rates dropped dramatically — the single dissenting voice did not need to be correct; it needed only to exist. The existence of one independent voice makes it safer for others to trust their own judgment, because the social cost of independence is shared. This predicts the specific value of deliberate devil’s advocate and red-team structures: the dissenting voice does not need to be right to produce commercial value; it needs only to break the unanimity that normative social influence requires to operate at full force.

What the entrepreneur should use social influence for and what they should not

The research supports a specific allocation of trust in social influence. Informational social influence is most warranted in domains where the group has genuine expertise or access advantages: legal, regulatory, and technical domains where the entrepreneur lacks pattern recognition; early customer research on specific behavioural questions; investor input on market dynamics in categories with a clear investment track record.

Normative social influence is most dangerous in the domains most central to the entrepreneur’s independent judgment: the core hypothesis about why the product exists, the assessment of customer motivation, and the read on whether the business is doing what the entrepreneur believes it is doing. These are precisely the domains where investor consensus and market scepticism carry the most emotional weight — and where the neural cost of independence is highest — which makes them the domains where the Deutsch-Gerard diagnostic is most essential before updating.

Books worth reading on this

Originals by Adam Grant. Grant’s account of how the most consequential entrepreneurial and institutional innovators maintain independent positions against majority consensus — covering the specific psychological and strategic practices that sustain independent judgment under social pressure — provides the most practically applicable available popular treatment of what Moscovici’s minority influence research looks like in the entrepreneurial context. His specific account of how the entrepreneur who holds an independent position can present it to maximise its chance of converting rather than alienating the audience is the most actionable available complement to the neural cost and minority influence findings this article describes.

If the dynamics described here are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Asch, S.E. (1956), Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority, Psychological Monographs, 70(9). Deutsch, M. & Gerard, H.B. (1955), A Study of Normative and Informational Social Influences upon Individual Judgment, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51(3), 629–636. Berns, G.S. et al. (2005), Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation, Biological Psychiatry, 58(3), 245–253. Moscovici, S. (1980), Toward a Theory of Conversion Behavior, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 209–239. Cialdini, R.B. & Goldstein, N.J. (2004), Social Influence: Compliance and Conformity, Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 591–621. Syed, M. (2019), Rebel Ideas, John Murray. Grant, A. (2016), Originals, Viking.