Solomon Asch
Solomon Eliot Asch 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. No error in thinking about social facts is more serious than the failure to see their place and function". Asch is most well known for his conformity experiments, in which he demonstrated the influence of group pressure on opinions. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Asch as the 41st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Early life
Asch was born in Warsaw, Poland, on September 14, 1907, to a Polish-Jewish family. He grew up in a small town of Łowicz in central Poland.In 1920, Asch emigrated aged 13 with his family to the United States. They lived on the Lower East Side of New York, a dense area of many Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants. His friends called him Shlaym.
Education
Asch was shy when he moved to the United States and did not speak English fluently due to being brought up in Poland. He went to the neighborhood public school, P.S. 147, to attend 6th grade. As a result of the language barrier, Asch had a very difficult time understanding in class. He learned English by reading Charles Dickens. Asch later attended Townsend Harris High School, a very selective high school attached to the City College of New York. After high school, he attended the City College of New York, majoring in both literature and science. He became interested in psychology towards the end of his undergraduate career after reading the work of William James and a few philosophers. In 1928, when he was 21 years old, he received his Bachelor of Science.Asch went on to pursue his graduate degree at Columbia University. He initially was interested in anthropology, not in social psychology. With the help of Gardner Murphy, Lois Murphy, Franz Boas, and Ruth Benedict he gained a summer fellowship and investigated how children become members of their culture. His master's thesis was a statistical analysis of the test scores of 200 children under the supervision of Woodworth. Asch received his master's degree in 1930. His doctoral dissertation examined whether all learning curves have the same form; H. E. Garrett assigned the topic to him. He received his PhD in 1932.
Asch was exposed to Gestalt psychology through Gardner Murphy, then a young faculty member at Columbia. He became much more interested in Gestalt psychology after meeting and working closely with his adviser at Columbia, Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology. Asch later became close friend with Wertheimer.
Family life
Asch met Florence Miller in a library on East Broadway on the lower East Side in New York City. They married in 1930. Their relationship was reported as being "easy, good-humored". Asch remained married to Florence his entire life. They had their first and only son, Peter, in 1937. Peter Asch became a professor of economics at Rutgers University, married Ruth Zindler and had two sons, Eric and David. Peter died of heart failure at age 52Career
Asch began his teaching career at Brooklyn College. In 1947, he moved to Swarthmore College, where he stayed for 19 years, until 1966. Swarthmore was the major center for scholars of Gestalt psychology at that time in the United States. Wolfgang Kohler, a German immigrant, W. C. H. Prentice and Hans Wallach were faculty members at that time as well.During his time at Swarthmore, Asch also served for two years as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. There, Stanley Milgram, who later became a prominent psychologist, worked as his research assistant.
In 1966, Asch left to found the Institute for Cognitive Studies at Rutgers University. In 1972, he moved to the University of Pennsylvania, teaching as a professor of psychology until he retired in 1979, and was Emeritus until 1996. Asch also had visiting posts at Harvard and MIT.
Work
Impression formation
Asch was interested in how humans form impressions of other human beings. He was intrigued how humans are able to easily form impressions of others despite complex structures. He specifically was interested in how impressions of other people were established and if there were any principles which regulated these impressions. Asch concluded "to know a person is to have a grasp of a particular structure". He demonstrated through his experiments that forming an impression has the following elements:- it is an organized process,
- the characteristics are perceived differently in relation to other characteristics,
- central qualities are discovered, causing a distinction between them and peripheral qualities,
- relations of harmony and contradiction are observed.
Central characteristics on impression formation
In one experiment, two groups, A and B, were exposed to a list of exactly the same characteristics except one, cold vs. warm. The list of characteristics given to each group are listed below:Group A: intelligent-skillful-industrious-warm-determined-practical-cautious
Group B: intelligent-skillful-industrious-cold-determined-practical-cautious
One group of people were told that the person was warm and another group of people were told the person is "cold". Participants were asked to write a brief description of the impression they formed after hearing these characteristics. The experimenters also produced a check list consisting of pairs of opposite traits, such as generous/ungenerous, shrewd/wise, etc. These words were related to the first list of characteristics they heard. Participants were asked to indicate which of these traits matched with the hypothetical person who had just been described to them.
Asch found that very different impressions were found based on this one characteristic in the list. In general, the "A" impressions were far more positive than the "B" impressions. Based on the results of the written descriptions of the hypothetical person, the meaning of the other characteristics in the list seemed to change, related to whether the hypothetical person was described as a "warm" or "cold" person.
Not all qualities were changed by this word. Words such as "honest", "strong", "serious", and "reliable" were not affected. The words "warm" and "cold" were shown to be of more importance in forming participant's impressions than other characteristics. They were considered to be basic to understanding the person, whereas other characteristics would be considered secondary. Thus, if another characteristic in this list was changed between two subjects, such as manipulating the words "polite" and "blunt", instead of the words "warm" and "cold", it would not affect the impression of the person as much as did "warm" and "cold". Asch called "warm" and "cold" "central" characteristics, and "polite" and "blunt" peripheral characteristics.
Order effects on impression formation
Asch found in another experiment, that the order in which he presented the traits of a hypothetical person drastically influenced the impression formed by participants formed. For example, participants were read one of the following lists below:Series A starts with desirable qualities and ends with undesirable qualities, while the reverse is true for Series B. As a result of this slight difference, people perceive person A as someone who is an "able person who possesses certain shortcomings which, do not, however, overshadow his merits". But, people perceive person B as a "problem, whose abilities are hampered by his serious difficulties". The meaning of the other words in this list also change in the majority of subjects between list A and list B. Words such as "impulsive" and "critical" take on a positive meaning with A, but a negative meaning with B.
Similarity and difference of impression
In another central experiment, Asch presented participants with four groups of characteristics. Each participant was exposed to the group of words listed below:Notice that only one characteristic, "helpful", is the same throughout all of the four sets. Participants were first asked which of the other three sets most resemble Set 1, and then asked which of the other sets most resembles Set 2. In 87 percent of the cases, Set 1 was seen most similar with Set 3. In only 13 percent of the cases, people reported Set 1 to be similar to Set 2. Also, Set 2 was said to resemble Set 4 in 85 percent of the cases and only 9 percent of the cases was it said to resemble Set I was the closest.
However, there are more "identical elements" in Set 1 and 2 and in Set 3 and 4. Notice that two of the three words are the same in Set 1 and 2 and in Set 3 and 4. The similarity in sets can not be based on the number of shared elements in the set. Participants also reported that the word "quick" of set 1 was most similar in meaning to "slow" of set 3. Similarly, "quick" of set 2 was perceived to be most similar in meaning to "slow" of set 4.
Asch reached the following conclusions based on this experiment:
- The meaning of a characteristic changes based on a change in the "environment" it's in. Thus, the meanings of the words "quick" and "slow" change based on what other words it is presented with or associated with in real life. The meaning of the word "quick" in set 1 is associated more with "one of assurance, of smoothness of movement" while in set 2 the word is associated with "forced quickness, in an effort to be helpful". In everyday life, people perceive a quick, skillful person to be very different from a quick, clumsy person. However, people perceive someone who is "quick and skillful" and "slow and skillful" as being similar and sharing the same quality of being more of an expert.
- The change in the meaning of the characteristic is determined by its relationship with other characteristics. " I is quick because he is skillful; 2 is clumsy because he is fast"
- "Dynamic consequences are grasped in the interaction of qualities",. Participants considered "quick" and "skillful" and "slow" and "skillful" as characteristics that cooperate together, but they think of "quick" and "clumsy" as characteristics that cancel one another.