Solomon Asch: biography and contributions of this famous social psychologist

Solomon Asch has been one of the most important figures in Psychology, especially in Social Psychology, of which he was a true pioneer. His research, permeated by the gestalt view that everything is more than the sum of its parts, contributed to understanding how obedience occurred in groups.

Next we are going to see the life and professional career of this researcher through a biography of Solomon Asch, also explaining his famous experiment.

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Brief biography of Solomon Asch

Solomon Asch was a Polish-American psychologist considered a pioneer in the study of the psychology of conformity. His works have made notable contributions to the field of Social Psychology, adopting the Gestalt approach to the study of social behavior.

He suggested that social acts cannot be understood in isolation, but that it is necessary to interpret them by seeing their environment.. This was evidenced in his famous conformity experiment, showing that people can change their response based on what they see other people think.

In addition to being a pioneer in Social Psychology, Asch is known for having supervised Stanley Milgram's doctorate during his time at Harvard University, heavily influencing his doctoral student's experiments. Milgran's work helped demonstrate how far people would go to obey an order from an authority figure.

A 2002 publication gave Solomon Asch the title of being the 41st most cited psychologist during the 20th century.

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early years

Solomon Eliot Asch was born in Warsaw, Poland, on September 14, 1907.. When he was 13 years old, he emigrated with his family to New York, United States, going to live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. At first, his life in America was troubled as he was not fluent in English, he managed to learn it prolifically by reading Charles Dickens.

Years later, he studied literature at the City College of New York. His interest in psychology began after reading William James. He received the Bachelor of Science at age 21 (1928). Later, he went to Columbia University to get his Ph.D.. There he received advice from Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of the Gestalt movement. That is why, after receiving his doctorate in 1932, Solomon Asch became increasingly interested in Gestalt Psychology.

He was especially interested in the phenomena of perception, thought and association. In fact, proof of his great Gestalt influence was that his work was based on the idea that not only is the whole more than the sum of its parts, but also that the nature of the whole alters those parts. In Asch's own words, "most social acts must be understood in their context, and they lose meaning if they are isolated. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than failing to see their place and function."

Asch, observing social acts within a context, carried out many studies delving into the influence of the group and the context in the opinions of the people. It is this that led him to perform what is probably his best-known experiment: the conformity experiment.

Observing social acts within a context, Asch conducted much research in which he investigated the influence of group and context on people's opinions. It is exactly this basis that led him to perform his most well-known experiment: the conformity experiment.

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Career

As a result of the barbarities committed by the Nazis during World War II, Solomon Asch became interested in knowing how it worked. the propaganda that gets a mass of diverse people to end up behaving according to what a person or an oligarchy wants. This he did while he was a professor in the psychology department at Brooklyn College.

Starting from this question, Asch investigated the influence of prestigious figures in the transmission of a message, seeing that people are more likely to accept a message and settle for it when the person who transmits it is perceived as an individual of high rank or prestige.

He also taught at Swarthmore College for 19 years, an institution where he had the opportunity to work with the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Kohler.

It was during the 1950s that the figure of Solomon Asch would become very important in Social Psychology. as a result of some experiments that would change the paradigm of the moment: the Asch obedience experiments. As a result of this and other experiments, Asch became very famous, and in his book "Social Psychology" (1952) in which he captured the development of his research and key concepts of his theory.

With his research, he revolutionized studies about the human mind and collective behavior. He also worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, he briefly worked at Harvard University, where he supervised the doctoral thesis of the famous and also controversial Stanlye Milgram.

From 1966 to 1972, Asch held the title of director of the Institute for Cognitive Studies at Rutgers University., also working there as a professor of psychology. Solomon Asch died on February 20, 1996 in Haverford, Pennsylvania, at the age of 88.

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The Conformity Experiment

Asch's conformity experiment is so important to the history of Social Psychology that it continues to be taught in university faculties to this day. Actually, it is a series of experiments that he carried out throughout 1951. This psychologist wondered to what extent society can influence the opinions of an individual, even if the social opinion, the most shared, is radically opposed to their personal perception. The idea was to prove that people submit to the power of the group, adopting an attitude of conformity.

Thus, Solomon Asch asked 123 men to participate in a study, informing them that they were going to participate in an experiment related to visual perception in groups of between 7 and 9 people. All of them, except one, were accomplices of the investigator. They were shown a card on which a line of a specific size could be seen. Participants were then shown three other cards labeled a, b, and c, which they contained lines of different sizes, one of them the same length as the line of the first card.

The participants had to choose in turns which was the card that showed the line similar to that of the first. A simple task, apparently. Everything was going well in the first rounds when the rest of Asch's accomplices chose the correct option. However, when the fourth round arrived, something curious happened: the accomplices chose the same wrong card. The real research participant, who used to have the last response turn, was in the dilemma to choose the obviously wrong answer that the rest of the “participants” had given or to choose the correct answer.

The results revealed something curious and, at the same time, surprising. Three quarters of the participants succumbed to what the rest of the group thought, choosing the wrong answer so as not to contradict the rest, even if the answer was logically wrong. Asch wondered if the participants who followed the general incorrect judgment really did so because they were convinced of the answer. He saw that no, that the people who yielded to the majority opinion diminished considerably when he allowed them to express their real decision in private.

This experiment has been replicated many times and similar results have been obtained. Solomon Asch's findings challenged the theory of social comparisondominant at the time. According to this theory, people tend to look for evidence about a situation in order to draw conclusions from it, and when the available information is not enough, it is when people resort to the opinion of others to form their own conclusion.

However, Solomon Asch broke with this idea, showing that even when people find concrete, empirical and objective evidence, tend to follow popular opinion even if it is wrong.