Solomon Eliot Asch (September 14, 1907 – February 20, 1996) was a Polish-born American psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. Asch conducted seminal research on impression formation, prestige suggestion, and many other issues. He is most well known for his conformity experiments, in which he demonstrated the influence of group pressure on opinions. As a proponent of Gestalt psychology, Asch's work reflects a common theme of that school of thought: that the whole is not only different from the sum of its parts, but the nature of the whole fundamentally alters our understanding of the parts. As he wrote in his book Social Psychology: "Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Asch as the 41st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Early life and education Asch was born in Warsaw, Poland, on September 14, 1907, to a Polish-Jewish family. He grew up in a small town of Łowicz in central Poland. In 1920, at age 13, Asch emigrated with his family to the United States. They lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a dense neighborhood populated with Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants. His friends called him Shlaym. Having been a shy child who was brought up in Poland, Asch initially did not speak English fluently. He attended sixth grade at his neighborhood's public school, P.S. 147. Because of the language barrier, Asch had difficulty understanding his teacher. He, however, learned English by reading Charles Dickens. Asch later attended Townsend Harris High School, a very selective high school attached to the City College of New York. After high school, he attended City College majoring in both literature and science. He became interested in psychology towards the end of his undergraduate career after reading the work of William James and a number of other philosophers. In 1928, when he was 21 years old, he received his Bachelor of Science. Asch went on to pursue a doctoral degree at Columbia University. He initially was interested in anthropology, not social psychology. With the help of Gardner Murphy, Lois Murphy, Franz Boas, and Ruth Benedict he obtained a summer fellowship and investigated how children become socialized into the surrounding cultural milieu. Under the supervision of Robert S. Woodworth, Asch's master's thesis involved a statistical analysis of the test scores of 200 children. He received his master's degree in 1930. For his doctoral dissertation, Asch examined commonalities of the form of learning curves; H. E. Garrett assigned the topic to him. He received his Ph.D. in 1932. Asch was exposed to Gestalt psychology through Gardner Murphy, then a young faculty member at Columbia. He became much more interested in Gestalt psychology after meeting and working closely with his adviser at Columbia, Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology. Later, Asch and Wertheimer became close friends.
Career Asch began his teaching career at Brooklyn College in 1932, after he earned his Ph.D. He left Brooklyn College for the New School for Social Research in 1943, where he replaced his mentor Max Wertheimer, who had recently died. In 1947, he moved to Swarthmore College, where he stayed until 1966. At the time Asch was there, Swarthmore was the major center of research that was oriented toward Gestalt psychology. During his time at Swarthmore, figures in Gestalt psychology such as Wolfgang Kohler, W. C. H. Prentice, and Hans Wallach were faculty members.
While at Swarthmore, Asch served for two years (1958–1960) as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. At the Institute, Stanley Milgram, who later became a prominent social psychologist, worked as Asch's research assistant. Dorothy Dinnerstein recruited Asch to leave Swarthmore for Rutgers University and become, in 1967, the first director of Rutgers's Institute for Cognitive Studies. In 1972, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, teaching as a professor of psychology until he retired in 1979, and was a Professor Emeritus. Asch also had visiting posts at Harvard and MIT.
Work
Impression formation Asch was interested in how humans form impressions of other human beings. He was intrigued how humans are able to easily form impressions of others despite complex structures. He specifically was interested in how impressions of other people were established and if there were any principles which regulated these impressions. Asch concluded "to know a person is to have a grasp of a particular structure". He demonstrated through his experiments that forming an impression has the following elements:
it is an organized process, the characteristics are perceived differently in relation to other characteristics, central qualities are discovered, causing a distinction between them and peripheral qualities, relations of harmony and contradiction are observed. Asch conducted many experiments in which he asked participants to form an impression of a hypothetical person based on several characteristics said to belong to them.
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