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".Asch, Solomon E. Social Psychology. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952. p. 61
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.Rock, Irvin. The Legacy of Solomon Asch: Essays in Cognition and Social Psychology, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990.
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.Social Psychology. (2025) Solomon E. Asch: The Gestalt Theory’s Impact on Social Psychology. Psychology Town. [https://psychology.town/social/asch-gestalt-theory-social-psychology-impact/} 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.Encyclopedia.com. (2018). Köhler, Wolfgang. Encyclopedia.com https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/medicine/psychology-and-psychiatry-biographies/wolfgang-koehler Prentice, W. C. H. (1961). Some cognitive aspects of motivation. American Psychologist, 16(8), 503–511. https://doi/10.1037/h0043450 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.Cole, D. (2009). Dorothy Dinnerstein. The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. 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.University of Pennsylvania Almanac. (1996). Death of Solomon Asch.
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:Asch, Solomon E. "Forming impressions of personality", The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 41.3 (1946): 258. 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.
Central characteristics on impression formation
In one experiment, two groups, A and B, were exposed to a list of exactly the same characteristics except one, cold vs. warm. The list of characteristics given to each group are listed below:
Group A: intelligent-skillful-industrious-warm-determined-practical-cautious
Group B: intelligent-skillful-industrious-cold-determined-practical-cautious
One group of people were told that the person was warm and another group of people were told the person is "cold". Participants were asked to write a brief description of the impression they formed after hearing these characteristics. The experimenters also produced a check list consisting of pairs of opposite traits, such as generous/ungenerous, shrewd/wise, etc. These words were related to the first list of characteristics they heard. Participants were asked to indicate which of these traits matched with the hypothetical person who had just been described to them.
Asch found that very different impressions were found based on this one characteristic in the list. In general, the "A" impressions were far more positive than the "B" impressions. Based on the results of the written descriptions of the hypothetical person, the meaning of the other characteristics in the list seemed to change, related to whether the hypothetical person was described as a "warm" or "cold" person.
Not all qualities were changed by this word. Words such as "honest", "strong", "serious", and "reliable" were not affected. The words "warm" and "cold" were shown to be of more importance in forming participant's impressions than other characteristics. They were considered to be basic to understanding the person, whereas other characteristics would be considered secondary. Thus, if another characteristic in this list was changed between two subjects, such as manipulating the words "polite" and "blunt", instead of the words "warm" and "cold", it would not affect the impression of the person as much as did "warm" and "cold". Asch called "warm" and "cold" "central" characteristics, and "polite" and "blunt" peripheral characteristics.
Order effects on impression formation
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. For example, participants were read one of the following lists below: A. intelligent-industrious-impulsive-critical-stubborn-envious, B. envious-stubborn-critical-impulsive-industrious-intelligent.
Series A starts with desirable qualities and ends with undesirable qualities, while the reverse is true for Series B. As a result of this slight difference, people perceive person A as someone who is an "able person who possesses certain shortcomings which, do not, however, overshadow his merits". But, people perceive person B as a "problem, whose abilities are hampered by his serious difficulties". The meaning of the other words in this list also change in the majority of subjects between list A and list B. Words such as "impulsive" and "critical" take on a positive meaning with A, but a negative meaning with B.
Similarity and difference of impression
In another central experiment, Asch presented participants with four groups of characteristics. Each participant was exposed to the group of words listed below: Set 1: Quick, Skillful, Helpful. Set 2: Quick, Clumsy, Helpful. Set 3: Slow, Skillful, Helpful. Set 4: Slow, Clumsy, Helpful.
Notice that only one characteristic, "helpful", is the same throughout all of the four sets. Participants were first asked which of the other three sets most resemble Set 1, and then asked which of the other sets most resembles Set 2. In 87 percent of the cases, Set 1 was seen most similar with Set 3. In only 13 percent of the cases, people reported Set 1 to be similar to Set 2. Also, Set 2 was said to resemble Set 4 in 85 percent of the cases and only 9 percent of the cases was it said to resemble Set I was the closest.
However, there are more "identical elements" in Set 1 and 2 and in Set 3 and 4. Notice that two of the three words are the same in Set 1 and 2 and in Set 3 and 4. The similarity in sets can not be based on the number of shared elements in the set. Participants also reported that the word "quick" of set 1 was most similar in meaning to "slow" of set 3. Similarly, "quick" of set 2 was perceived to be most similar in meaning to "slow" of set 4.
Asch reached the following conclusions based on this experiment: The meaning of a characteristic changes based on a change in the "environment" it's in. Thus, the meanings of the words "quick" and "slow" change based on what other words it is presented with or associated with in real life. The meaning of the word "quick" in set 1 is associated more with "one of assurance, of smoothness of movement" while in set 2 the word is associated with "forced quickness, in an effort to be helpful". In everyday life, people perceive a quick, skillful person to be very different from a quick, clumsy person. However, people perceive someone who is "quick and skillful" and "slow and skillful" as being similar and sharing the same quality of being more of an expert. The change in the meaning of the characteristic is determined by its relationship with other characteristics. "[Set] I is quick because he is skillful; [Set] 2 is clumsy because he is fast" "In [Set] 3 slowness indicates care, prides in work well-done. Slowness in [Set] 4 indicates sluggishness, poor motor coordinate, some physical retardation". People arrive at an overall impression by integrating the relationships of the different qualities of a person. Therefore, they form very different impressions when one of these qualities differ.