Solomon Asch

Solomon E. Asch (September 14, 1907 - February 20, 1996) was a world-renowned American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. He was born in Warsaw, then in 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. He 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.

The way he did this was through an experiment in which 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. At first, the subject would feel very at ease in the experiment, as he and the other participants gave the obvious answer. Shortly after, the "participants" in front of the subject would start all giving the same wrong answer. Solomon Asch thought that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong, but the results showed that an alarming number of participants gave the wrong answer. See Asch conformity experiments

He also cooperated with H. Witkin and inspired many ideas of the theory of cognitive style.

He inspired the work of the controversial psychologist Stanley Milgram and supervised his Ph.D at Harvard University.

Notable contributions

 * Halo effect
 * Primacy effect
 * Asch conformity experiments