That impact was of central interest

That impact was of central interest in early research by Roethlisberger and Dickson (1939). Examining attitudes broadly, they observed that “the meanings which any person in an industrial organization assigns to the events and objects in his environment are often determined by the social situation in which the events or objective occur” (p. 557). Themes of that kind were frequently explored in laboratory and other studies by psychologists in the 1950s and 1960s, emphasizing that a person’s mental life is substantially influenced by information and pressure to conformity arising from people and groups.