Solomon Asch

Solomon E. Asch (September 14, 1907 - February 20, 1996) was a world-renowned American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. Solomon Asch is famous for his research in the field of conformity including his well known experiments which showed that social pressure can make a person say something that is obviously incorrect.

Life

Solomon Asch was born on September 14, 1907 in Warsaw, Poland, which at that time belonged to the Russian Empire. His family moved to the United States in 1920, where they lived in New York City. The young Asch learned English by reading the works of Charles Dickens.

He received his bachelors degree from The College of the City of New York in 1928. Asch went on to study psychology at Columbia University, where he received his master's degree in 1930 and Ph.D. in 1932. His principal mentor at Columbia was the pioneering Gestalt psychologist, Max Wertheimer.

Asch continued to live and work in the New York area for several years. He married his wife, Florence, and their son, Peter, was born while they lived in Brooklyn. Peter became a professor of economics at Rutgers University, where Solomon Asch also taught.

Asch had a distinguished academic career as a psychologist that spanned half a century. After holding a number of teaching positions in New York, including at Brooklyn College and the New School for Social Research, he taught for 19 years at Swarthmore College where he worked with a group of prominent psychologists including Wolfgang Köhler, another key figure in the development Gestalt psychology. He also held visiting posts at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Asch served as professor and director of the Institute for Cognitive Studies at Rutgers University from 1966 to 1972, after which he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as a professor in 1972, remaining there as emeritus professor from 1979.

Asch's research focused on the impact of the social context on our perception and understanding of the world. His most famous studies were on conformity. He recounted an early childhood experience in Poland as the inspiration for this work. Attending a Passover Seder as a young boy he had asked who the extra glass of wine was for and was told the prophet Elijah. He was also told that Elijah would indeed drink the wine. With that expectation, Asch thought he saw the level of the wine drop a little.

He began his research in the 1930s when Adolf Hitler had come to power and social influence, in the form of propaganda and indoctrination, on people's behavior was of great interest. Based on his studies, Asch concluded that propaganda is most effective when ignorance and fear are combined. However, he held the belief that human beings seek truth not falsehood, and that although they can be misled into regrettable actions people will act in a good way when given the appropriate information.

As well as his teaching and research, Asch served as president of the Division of Personality and Social Psychology of the American Psychological Association and as chairman of its Committee on Academic Freedom in 1957. He was also associate editor of the journal Psychological Review from 1957 to 1962.

Asch received many awards including the Nicholas Murray Butler Medal from Columbia University in 1962 and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 1967.

Solomon Asch died on February 20, 1996 in Haverford, Pennsylvania at the age of 88. Florence Asch, his wife of years, survived him for six years, dying on March 27, 2002 aged 92.

Work

Solomon Asch began his work as a student and later colleague of Gestalt psychologists. They regarded perception, learning, and cognition as structured wholes rather than the sum of individual components connected by association, and thus were in opposition to the Behaviorist approach. The Gestalt school, however, held in common with Behaviorism the importance of the scientific method, and both rejected the introspective approach and the psychoanalytic school.

Social Psychology

With this background, when Asch turned his attention to the impact of social factors on our perception of the world, his approach was groundbreaking. Through his experiments he demonstrated the importance of socially defined reality. Several of these, in particular his conformity experiments, are regarded as seminal studies in the field of social psychology.

Asch's work was more than a series of experiments, however, as his writings set the direction for this field in the twentieth century. His text Social Pschology, first published in 1952 and reprinted in 1987, was revolutionary in its approach and became the standard text in the field for decades. It is still relevant to the problems of social psychology today.

Conformity experiments

The Asch conformity experiments, which were published in the early 1950s, were a series of studies that starkly demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. This experiment was conducted with 123 male participants. Each participant was put into a group with 5 to 7 "confederates" (People who knew the true aims of the experiment, but were introduced as participants to the naive "real" participant). The 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 in length. Each line question was called a "trial." The "real" participant answered last or penultimately. For the first two trials, the subject would feel at ease in the experiment, as he and the other "participants" gave the obvious, correct answer. On the third trial, the confederates would start all giving the same wrong answer. There were 18 trials in total and the confederates answered incorrectly for 12 of them, these 12 were known as the "critical trials." The aim was to see whether the real participant would change his answer and respond in the same way as the confederates, despite it being the wrong answer. Solomon Asch thought that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong, but the results showed that participants conformed to the majority on 32% of the critical trials. However, 25% of the participants did not conform on any trial.

Solomon Asch is best known for his a series of experiments (1956) on the effects of group pressure on a single individual. In these experiments the situation was so contrived that all members of a group were in collusion except one. E. G., subjects were asked to compare the length of lines as longer or shorter. Those in collusion purposely made incorrect judgments, so the single naive subject was caught between what he or she wanted to report and what was reported by the other members of the group. The general tendency was for the single subject go along with the reports of his peers, despite the fact that his or her own sensory discriminations indicated otherwise. With the increase of the size of the majority group, the pressure toward conformity was strengthened. Conformity did not occur for all subjects. Some maintained their independence in what they judged to be correct,going against the consensus of the majority.

It is a situation to test conformity to group opinion. A person is asked to state an opinion after being led to believe that all other members of a viewing group have the same, but incorrect, opinion.

One of the pairs of cards used in the experiment. The card on the left has the reference line and the one on the right shows the three comparison lines.

Experiments led by Solomon Asch asked groups of students to participate in a "vision test." In reality, all but one of the participants were confederates of the experimenter, and the study was really about how the remaining student would react to the confederates' behavior.

In the basic Asch paradigm, the participants — the real subject and the confederates — were all seated in a classroom. They were asked a variety of question about the lines (which line was longer than the other, which lines were the same length, etc.) The group was told to announce their answers to each question out loud and the confederates always provided their answers before the study participant. The confederates always gave the same answer. They answered a few questions correctly but eventually began providing incorrect responses.

It is important to note that the questions asked in this study were very easy. In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous view, only one subject out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer. Solomon Asch hypothesized that the majority of people would not conform to something obviously wrong; however, when surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions (32%). Seventy-five percent of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question.

Variations of the basic paradigm tested how many confederates were necessary to induce conformity, examining the influence of just 1 confederate and as many as 15 confederates. Results indicate that 1 confederate has virtually no influence and 2 confederates have only a small influence. When 3 or more confederates are present, the tendency to conform is relatively stable.

The unanimity of the confederates has also been varied. When the confederates are not unanimous in their judgment, even if only 1 confederate voices a different opinion, participants are much more likely to resist the urge to conform than when the confederates all agree. This finding illuminates the power that even a small dissenting minority can have. Interestingly, this finding holds whether or not the dissenting confederate gives the correct answer. As long as the dissenting confederate gives an answer that is different from the majority, participants are more likely to give the correct answer.

One difference between the Asch conformity experiments and the Milgram experiment as carried out by Stanley Milgram (also famous in social psychology) is that the subjects of these studies attributed their performance to their own misjudgment and "poor eyesight," while those in the Milgram experiment blamed the experimenter in explaining their behavior. Conformity may be much less salient than authority pressure.

The Asch experiments may provide some vivid empirical evidence relevant to some of the ideas raised in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Critiques

Modern social psychology built on and elaborated the phenomena and experimental approaches that Asch pioneered in his experiments. But to his distress, the context-oriented perspective that he pioneered has too often been overlooked. "We cannot be true to a fragment of man if we are not true, in at least a rudimentary way, to man himself," he argued (1959, p. 368). He further/ also noted: "One would not often suspect that we were talking of an organism capable of keeping or betraying faith with others, in whose history religious beliefs have played quite a part, who can cry out for justice" (1959, p. 367).

A number of critiques have been levelled against Asch's experiment including a question of the motivation of students to be accurate. Rather than testing conformity, Asch's study may have simply measured an uninterested student's reluctance to engage in conflict to get the answer right. Moreover, in Asch's experiments the subjects were not allowed to interact with confederates. When the experiment was conducted in which even one confederate was allowed to give the correct answer, conforming responses dropped significantly. This is consistent with Milgram's later findings of the effect of "role models for defiance" in his classic Obedience Experiment.

Asch's experiment only tested behavioral acquiescence and not attitude change.

A 2005 study (described in [1]) using functional M.R.I. scanners showed that social conformity engages regions of the brain devoted to spatial awareness. In other words, experimental subjects who gave in to group pressure actually saw things that way. Conformity was due to a change in perception rather than conscious judgment.

Legacy

Solomon Asch has shown how to construct a meaningful social psychology. Asch's most famous experiments demonstrated the importance of socially defined reality.

Social psychology

Solomon Asch's classic textbook, Social Psychology (1952/1987), offers an eloquent statement of his vision and persuasively presents the human person as complex but researchable, socially situated yet independent.

The great challenge for social psychology has been to create a felicious combination of the rigor of natural science with the rich complexity of human social life. Asch showed the way to this balanced and productive blend of natural and social science. On the one hand, Asch was a pioneer of the clever and crucial experiment, of disciplined data collection with an eye toward alternative accounts. On the other hand, he insisted on the fundamental role of context and relations, the richness of the human mind, and the importance of being informed by history, culture, the arts, and human common sense. In contrast to the two dominant ideologies in psychology in his time, behaviorism and psychoanalysis, Asch assumed that humans were basically rational and decent, and that the social world and social matrix of human life had a level of organization worth of attention in its own right.

In his classic text (Asch, 1952/1987), Asch begins with an extended discussion of views of human nature, and later devotes a whole chapter to the problem of how we know of the existence of other minds.

Influence on other researchers

It was Solomon Asch that inspired the work of the controversial psychologist Stanley Milgram, who had served as Asch's teaching and research assistant at Harvard University, as well as helping him edit a book on conformity, and considered Asch to be the most important scientific influence on his research (Blass, 2004). In his own research Milgram explored the possibility that social pressure had the power to influence something more consequential than the simple line judgments that Asch had used. Milgram's experiments on obedience to authority shocked the world.

Solomon Asch also cooperated with Herman Witkin (1916—1979) and inspired many of his ideas on cognitive style. Witkin was interested in how personality can be revealed through differences in how people perceive their environment. While Asch studied the impact of the social environment, Witkin focused on the perceptual context. He developed the Embedded Figures Test which identifies an individual's perception when asked to distinguish object figures from the content field, a distracting or confusing background, in which they are set. This instrument distinguishes field-independent from field-dependent cognitive types. Field-independent people are quickly able to find the hidden figures, while field-dependent people have trouble locating simple figures embedded within more complex surroundings.

Major works

• Asch, S. E. 1946. Forming impressions of personality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41(3): 258-290. Retrieved December 15, 2010.
• Asch, S. E. 1951. Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgment. In H. Guetzkow (ed.) Groups, leadership and men. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press. (summary Retrieved December 29, 2010.)
• Asch, S. E. [1952] 1987. Social Psychology. New York, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198521723
• Asch, S. E. 1955. Opinions and Social Pressure Scientific American, 193: 31-35. Retrieved December 15, 2010.
• Asch, S. E. 1956. Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70 (Whole no. 416).
• Asch, S. E. 1962. A perspective on social psychology. In Koch, Sigmund (ed.), Psychology: A Study of a Science, 3: 363-383. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Benner, David G., and Peter C. Hill (eds). 1999. Baker Encyclopedia of Psychology and Counseling. Baker Books. ISBN 978-0801021008
• Blass, Thomas. 2004. The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York, NY: Basic Books. ISBN 0738203998
• Bond, R., and P. Smith. 1996. Culture and conformity: A meta-analysis of studies using Asch’s (1952b, 1956) line judgment task. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 111-137.
• Ceraso, J., Rock, I., and Gruber H. 1990. On Solomon Asch. In The Legacy of Solomon Asch: Essays on Cognition and Social Psychology. Psychology Press.
• Cherry, Kendra. 2010. Solomon Asch Biography. Psychology Guide, About.com, Inc. Retrieved December 29, 2010.
• Cherry, Kendra. 2010. The Asch Conformity Experiments. Psychology Guide, About.com, Inc. Retrieved December 29, 2010.
• Rock, Irvin. (ed.) 1990. The Legacy of Solomon Asch: Essays in Cognition and Social Psychology. Psychology Press. ISBN 0805804404
• Stout, David. 1996. Solomon Asch Is Dead at 88; A Leading Social Psychologist New York Times. Retrieved January 24, 2011.
• Wren, Kevin. 1999. Social Influences. Routledge. ISBN 0415186587

External links

• Science Aid: Asch experiment A look at majority influence and Asch's experiment for high school level
• Changingminds: Normative social influence
• Age of the sage summary of one Asch experiment
• BBC Radio: Mind changers: Solomon Asch
• What Other People Say May Change What You See
• The Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict Bryn Mawr College
• Solomon Asch Award Swarthmore College
• Death of Solomon Asch University of Pennsylvania Almanac
• Finding Aid for Solomon Asch Archives of the History of American Psychology, The University of Akron

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