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 Asch conformity experiments which showed that social pressure can make a person say something that is obviously incorrect.

Life

Solomon Asch was born in Warsaw, Poland on 14 September, 1907. Warsaw then belonged to the Russian Empire. He came to the United States in 1920. Asch received his bachelor degree from The College of the City of New York in 1928. At Columbia University, Solomon Asch received his master's degree in 1930 and Ph.D. in 1932. At Columbia University, his principal mentor was the pioneering Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer. Solomon Asch was a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College for 19 years, working with prominent psychologists including Wolfgang Köhler, another founder of Gestalt psychology.

Work

Solomon Asch's most famous experiments have demonstrated the importance of socially defined reality.

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.

Asch conformity experiments

Solomon Asch is best known foe 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 thesigle naive subject was caught between what he or she wanted to report and what was reported by the other menbers 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 othewise. 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 consesus of the majority.

The Asch conformity experiments are also known as the Asch Paradigm.

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. It is also known as Asch situation.

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 outloud 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 1 subject out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer. However, when surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions (37%). 75% 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. This also helps illustrate the concept of Pointing at a deer and calling it a horse (Traditional Chinese: 指鹿為馬, Simplified Chinese: 指鹿为马).

Legacy

Solomon Asch has shown how to construct a meaningful social psychology.

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.

Asch cooperated with Herman Witkin and inspired many ideas of the theory of cognitive style. Asch's experiments were highly unique.

It was Solomon Asch that inspired the work of the controversial psychologist Stanley Milgram and supervised his Ph.D at Harvard University.

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.

References

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• Asch, S. E. 1946. Forming impressions od personality. Journal of Abnornal and Social Psychology, 41, 258-290.
• 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 here)
• Asch, S. E. 1955. Opinions and social pressure. Scientific American, 193, 31-35.
• Asch, Solomon. Opinions and Social Pressure (1955)
• Asch, S. E. 1987. Social Psychology. New York, Oxford University Press. (Original Work publishe in 1952)
• 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. A perspective on social psychology. Psychology: A study of a science, S. Koch Editor, Vol. 3, pp. 363-383. New York, McGraw Hill.
• Benner, David G. and Peter C. Hill, editors. 1999. Baker Encyclopedia of Psychology and Counseling. Baker Books. ISBN 978-0801021008
• Bond, R., & Smith, P. 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 cognitive and social psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Rock, I. (Ed.) 1990. The legacy of Solomon Asch: Essays on cognitive and social psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

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
• Video
• The Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict

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