Social forces are group standards for behavior that influence decision making. In the Challenger disaster, engineers were unable to persuade their own managers and higher NASA officials to postpone the launch. They tried to prove that it was unsafe to launch rather than take the opposite (and possibly more effective) tactic: showing that no data existed to prove that the launch was safe. Part of the difficulty may have been some loyalty to or pride in the NASA identity. With so many years of successes in the space program, many members may have felt that no project of NASA’s could be unsafe.