Solomon Asch

Solomon Asch
Born	September 14, 1907 Warsaw, Poland
Died	February 20, 1996 (aged 88) Haverford, Pennsylvania, USA
Nationality	Polish
Alma mater	College of the City of New York, Columbia University
Known for	Social psychology (Social influence, conformity)
Scientific career
Fields	Psychology (Gestalt, social, cognitive)
Institutions	College of the City of New York, Columbia University, Swarthmore College, Harvard University
Academic advisors	H. E. Garrett
Notable students	Stanley Milgram

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

Early life and education

He was born in Warsaw which then belonged to the Russian Empire, and emigrated to the United States in 1920. He received his bachelor's degree 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.

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 participants conformed to the majority on 37% of the critical trials. However, 25% of the participants did not conform on any trial. 75% conformed at least once, and 5% conformed every time.

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References

• Rock, Irvin, ed. (1990). The Legacy of Solomon Asch: Essays in Cognition and Social Psychology. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0805804404. Retrieved 2009-01-30.

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".