Solomon Asch - Biography

Solomon Eliot Asch (September 14, 1907 – February 20, 1996), also known as Shlaym, was an American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology.

Early life and education

Asch was born in Warsaw which then belonged to the Russian Empire, to a Jewish Family. He immigrated to the United States in 1920 and received his bachelor's degree, majoring in psychology from the College of the City of New York in 1928. At Columbia University, he received his master's degree in 1930 and Ph.D. in 1932.

Career

Asch was a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College for 19 years, working with psychologists including Wolfgang Köhler.

He became famous in the 1950s, following experiments which showed that social pressure can make a person say something that is obviously incorrect. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965.

This experiment was conducted using 123 male participants. Each participant was put into a group with 5 to 7 "confederates" (people who knew the true aims of the experiment, but were introduced as participants to the naive "real" participant). The participants were shown a card with a line on it, followed by another card with 3 lines on it labeled a, b, and c. The participants were then asked to say which line matched the line on the first card in length. Each line question was called a "trial". The "real" participant answered last or penultimately. For the first two trials, the subject would feel at ease in the experiment, as he and the other "participants" gave the obvious, correct answer. On the third trial, the confederates would start all giving the same wrong answer. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates answered incorrectly for 12 of them, these 12 were known as the "critical trials". The aim was to see whether the real participant would change his answer and respond in the same way as the confederates, despite it being the wrong answer.

Solomon Asch thought that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong, but the results showed that 25% of the participants did not conform on any trial. 75% conformed at least once, and 5% conformed every time (37% conformity over subjects averaged across the critical trials). Asch suggested that this reflected poorly on factors such as education, which he thought must over-train conformity.Others have argued that it is rational to use other people's judgments as evidence. '. Other's suggest it is polite and politic; consistent with subject's claim that they did not believe the other's judements – they merely conformed.

Meta-analyses suggest that a single additional dissenter dramatically reduces (to 5-10%); that males show around half the effect of females (tested in same-sex groups); and conformity is higher among members of an ingroup

He also cooperated with H. Witkin and inspired many ideas of the theory of cognitive style, and inspired the work of the psychologist Stanley Milgram and supervised his Ph.D at Harvard University.

See also

• Asch conformity experiments

External links

• The Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict
• Solomon Asch: Forming Impressions of Personality Full text of the classic journal article that introduced the concept of central versus peripheral traits and the "halo effect".