Solomon Asch

Solomon Asch

Solomon Eliot Asch (September 14, 1907 – February 20, 1996) was a Polish-American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. He created seminal pieces of work in impression formation, prestige suggestion, conformity, and many other topics. His work follows a common theme of Gestalt psychology that the whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but the nature of the whole fundamentally alters the parts. Asch stated: "Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated. Read more on Wikipedia

His biography is available in different languages on Wikipedia. Solomon Asch is the 52nd most popular psychologist (up from 59th in 2019), the 171st most popular biography from Poland (up from 183rd in 2019) and the 3rd most popular Polish Psychologist.

Solomon Asch was a social psychologist who conducted experiments on conformity in the 1950s. His most famous experiment was called the "line experiment." In this experiment, participants were shown a line on a card and then asked to identify which of three lines on another card was the same length as the one on the first card. The participants were in groups of seven, and one of the other participants was a confederate of the experimenter. The confederate would give an incorrect answer and then the rest of the group would give an incorrect answer. The participant would be the only one in the group to give the correct answer. The participant would then be asked to say how confident they were in their answer. Asch found that when the confederate gave an incorrect answer, the participant would often change their answer to match the group.