Solomon Asch

Solomon Eliot Asch (September 14, 1907 – February 20, 1996) was a Polish-American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology.

He created seminal pieces of work in impression formation, prestige suggestion, conformity, and many other topics.

His work follows a common theme of Gestalt psychology that the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but the nature of the whole fundamentally alters the parts.

Asch stated: "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".

Asch is most well known for his conformity experiments, in which he demonstrated the influence of group pressure on opinions.

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, Asch emigrated aged 13 with his family to the United States.

They lived on the Lower East Side of New York, a dense area of many Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants.

His friends called him Shlaym.

Asch was shy when he moved to the United States and did not speak English fluently due to being brought up in Poland.

In 1928, when he was 21 years old, he received his Bachelor of Science.

Asch went on to pursue his graduate degree at Columbia University.

He initially was interested in anthropology, not in social psychology.

With the help of Gardner Murphy, Lois Murphy, Franz Boas, and Ruth Benedict he gained a summer fellowship and investigated how children become members of their culture.

His master's thesis was a statistical analysis of the test scores of 200 children under the supervision of Woodworth.

Asch received his master's degree in 1930.

His doctoral dissertation examined whether all learning curves have the same form; H.

E. Garrett assigned the topic to him.

They married in 1930.

Their relationship was reported as being "easy, good-humored" (Rock, p. 5).

Asch remained married to Florence his entire life.

He received his PhD 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.

Asch later became close friend with Wertheimer.

Asch met Florence Miller in a library on East Broadway on the lower East Side in New York City.

They had their first and only son, Peter, in 1937.

Peter Asch became a professor of economics at Rutgers University, married Ruth Zindler and had two sons, Eric and David.

Peter died of heart failure at age 52 (prior to both parents and his wife.)

Asch began his teaching career at Brooklyn College.

In 1947, he moved to Swarthmore College, where he stayed for 19 years, until 1966.

Swarthmore was the major center for scholars of Gestalt psychology at that time in the United States.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Asch as the 41st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

He went to the neighborhood public school, P.S. 147, to attend 6th grade.

As a result of the language barrier, Asch had a very difficult time understanding in class.

He 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 the City College of New York, 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 few philosophers.