Psychologists / social
Solomon Asch
United States 1907-09-14 ~ 1996-02-20
Polish-American Gestalt social psychologist (1907-1996). His 1951 conformity studies showed that over a third of subjects went along with a wrong majority. His 1946 paper named warm/cold as central traits in impression.
What You Can Learn
Asch's conformity experiments are the classic lens for modern meetings and the SNS-era spiral of silence. When a meeting looks like full agreement, the reality may be silenced dissent — and a single dissenter restores honest debate, as his data showed. For managers: institutionalize a devil's advocate and reward the first dissenter. SNS pile-ons and market manias saturate quickly after a few early conformers. Replications find conformity slightly lower than in his era, so context matters.
Words That Resonate
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.
The tendency to conformity in our society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black. This is a matter of concern.
The presence of a supporting partner depleted the majority of much of its power. Its pressure on the individual was reduced to one fourth.
Independence and conformity were the two main attitudes toward the majority pressure, and most subjects exhibited some of each.
To know a person is to have a grasp of a particular structure.
Life & Legacy
Solomon Eliot Asch was born on 14 September 1907 in Warsaw. He grew up in the small town of Lowicz before emigrating with his family to New York in 1920 at the age of thirteen. They lived on Manhattan's Lower East Side. He spoke no English at first and learned by reading Dickens. After Townsend Harris High School and the City College of New York he received his BS in 1928, took a master's at Columbia in 1930 and a PhD in 1932, originally studying anthropology under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict.
At Columbia he encountered Max Wertheimer, a founder of Gestalt psychology. Wertheimer became his lifelong mentor, and the claim that the whole is not the sum of its parts shaped all of Asch's later work. He taught at Brooklyn College from 1932, moved to the New School in 1943 to replace Wertheimer after his death, and from 1947 spent nineteen years at Swarthmore, then the major center of Gestalt research alongside Wolfgang Kohler.
After the war his attention turned to propaganda and group pressure. In Forming Impressions of Personality (1946) he showed that swapping a single word — warm versus cold — in a list of personality traits dramatically reshaped a subject's overall impression. Warm and cold were central traits; polite and blunt were not. The finding seeded later research on social cognition and bias.
His most famous work began in 1951 and culminated in Studies of Independence and Conformity (1956). A subject sat with seven or eight confederates and judged which of three lines matched a reference. When the confederates chose an obviously wrong line, about 75 percent of subjects went along at least once; across twelve critical trials they conformed on roughly a third of judgments. About 23 percent remained fully independent, 4.8 percent fully conformed. A single truthful ally cut conformity pressure to a quarter. At the Institute for Advanced Study (1958-1960) he supervised the young Stanley Milgram. Asch died in Haverford, PA, on 20 February 1996 at age 88.
Expert Perspective
Asch was the heir of Gestalt psychology in American social psychology, recasting the field as a science of the whole rather than isolated stimuli. He links Wertheimer and Kohler to his student Stanley Milgram and to Harold Kelley. A 2002 survey ranked him the 41st most cited psychologist of the twentieth century.
