58 Facts About Solomon Asch

Solomon Eliot Asch was a Polish-American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology.

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

Solomon Asch's 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.

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

Solomon Asch was born in Warsaw, Poland, on September 14,1907, to a Polish-Jewish family.

In 1920, Solomon Asch emigrated aged 13 with his family to the United States.

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

Solomon Asch later attended Townsend Harris High School, a very selective high school attached to the City College of New York.

Solomon Asch became interested in psychology towards the end of his undergraduate career after reading the work of William James and a few philosophers.

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

Solomon Asch initially was interested in anthropology, not in social psychology.

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

Solomon Asch was exposed to Gestalt psychology through Gardner Murphy, then a young faculty member at Columbia.

Solomon Asch 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.

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

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

In 1966, Solomon Asch left to found the Institute for Cognitive Studies at Rutgers University.

Solomon Asch was interested in how humans form impressions of other human beings.

Solomon Asch was intrigued how humans are able to easily form impressions of others despite complex structures.

Solomon Asch specifically was interested in how impressions of other people were established and if there were any principles which regulated these impressions.

Solomon Asch concluded "to know a person is to have a grasp of a particular structure".

Solomon Asch demonstrated through his experiments that forming an impression has the following elements:.

Solomon 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.

Solomon Asch found that very different impressions were found based on this one characteristic in the list.

Solomon Asch found in another experiment, that the order in which he presented the traits of a hypothetical person drastically influenced the impression formed by participants formed.

Many social psychologists prior to Solomon Asch had studied this phenomenon.

However, Solomon Asch disagreed with many of them and critiqued their interpretations.

Solomon Asch suggests that participants are not blindly accepting a message based on the author, but rather they are making meaning of the quote based on the author.

Solomon Asch called into question the present theory for the underlying psychological process concerning the effect of group forces on the formation and change of opinions and attitudes.

Solomon Asch critiqued the experimental approach of many different psychologists, including Zillig, Moore, Marple, Sherif, Thorndike, and Lorge, in their investigations of evaluation change.

Solomon Asch reinterpreted Lorge's findings and suggested that there was "a change in the object of judgment, rather than in the judgment of the object".

Solomon Asch suggested that a person will redefine the object of judgment based on the content of the evaluations.

In evidence of his claims, Solomon Asch conducted an experiment in which college students read statements with the name of one author below each statement.

Solomon Asch conducted a very similar and classic study with participants reading statements either attributed to Jefferson or Lenin.

Solomon Asch suggested that Sherif's results could be largely influenced from the environment of a laboratory experiment.

Solomon Asch's main finding was that peer pressure can change opinion and even perception.

Solomon Asch found the majority of the participants succumbed at least once to the pressure and went with the majority.

Solomon Asch suggested that this procedure created a doubt in the participants' mind about the seemingly obvious answer.

Solomon Asch found that the effectiveness of the group pressure increased significantly from 1 person to 3 people unanimously responding incorrectly.

Solomon Asch found that when one confederate responded correctly, the power of the majority to influence the subject decreased substantially.

Solomon Asch told his colleagues that his studies of conformity were informed by his childhood experiences in Poland.

Solomon Asch recalled being seven years old and staying up for his first Passover night.

Solomon Asch recalls seeing his grandmother pour an extra glass of wine.

Solomon Asch then asked her whether Elijah would really take a sip from the glass and his uncle assured him that he would.

Solomon Asch's uncle told him to watch very closely when the time came.

Early in life, Solomon Asch succumbed to social pressure, an experience which led him to investigate conformity later in life.

Solomon Asch looked at metaphors in a variety of different languages, such as Old Testament Hebrew, Homeric Greek, Chinese, Thai, Malayalam, and Hausa.

Solomon Asch found that there was a similar meaning for the sensory term, such as "cold" in English, and the corresponding personality trait.

Solomon Asch concluded that metaphors, and thus language, reflects a person's attempt to understand the true properties of a person or object.

Solomon Asch showed that simple properties would enter into associations much easier, when they are part of the same unit than when they are from different units.

Solomon Asch was Stanley Milgram's advisor at Princeton University, and Milgram completed his dissertation on national differences under conformity under Solomon Asch.

Solomon Asch largely influenced the theory of many other social psychologists, such as Harold Kelley.

Second, Solomon Asch emphasized that independent thought and disagreement among group members is a cornerstone of group functioning.

Solomon Asch believed that only by settling our differences with other group members can we actually understand the shortcomings of our own beliefs.

Solomon Asch believed the relationship between conformity and non-conformity was not as simple as one being the opposite of the other.

Lastly, Solomon Asch suggested that group influence can change how people perceive stimuli.

Solomon Asch was worried that social psychologists were not asking the deeper questions that would help change and improve the world.

Solomon Asch died at the age of 88 on February 20,1996, in his home in Haverford, Pennsylvania.