Solomon Ash

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Solomon Ash

Solomon Elliot Asch (born September 14, 1907 in Warsaw , † February 20, 1996 in Haverford , Pennsylvania ) was a Polish - American gestalt psychologist and pioneer of social psychology .

Life

Asch emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1920. In 1932 he graduated from Columbia University with a Ph.D. from. Asch was a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College for more than 19 years . There he worked with numerous psychologists, including Wolfgang Köhler .

Asch became known in the 1950s with experiments such as the conformity experiment , which showed how conformity pressure can influence a person in such a way that they judge an obviously incorrect statement as correct.

With his theses he had a lasting influence on the work of the psychologist Stanley Milgram and was his doctoral supervisor at Harvard University . S. Asch also worked with Herman A. Witkin in developing the theory of cognitive styles. In the early 1970s, Asch's experiments u. a. a contribution to the theory of the spiral of silence by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann .

His book "Social Psychology", published in 1952, became one of the standard works in this field. Noel Sheehy included Asch in his compendium “50 Key Thinkers in Psychology”. In 1965 Asch was awarded the honor of " Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences ".

The Asch Paradigm of Impression Formation

In an attempt to create an impression, Asch presented test subjects with a list of adjectives from a (fictional) person. The test person was then asked to write an essay about the person characterized.

Characteristics / adjectives:

  • Person A is skillful, hardworking, friendly, determined, practical, careful.
  • Person B is skillful, hardworking, cold, determined, practical, careful.

Person A was assessed very differently from person B due to the characteristics mentioned in the test person's essays and also their assessments of other characteristics of the persons. For example, most people rated person A as generous, while person B was not. Replacing friendly with cold obviously created this effect. In this experiment, the properties friendly (in the original: warm ) and cold turned out to be central. But friendly and cold were not always central. The properties themselves were also interpreted completely differently in different contexts. In the combination with obedient, weak, superficial, warm, not very ambitious, friendly meant something different than in the combinations mentioned above. Asch concludes from this that the overall impression of a person cannot be explained by the sum of the individual pieces of information or features available. The overall impression is therefore more than the sum of the individual parts.

The first impression

In addition, Asch found out that the information given first about a person serves as the basis for classifying the following information. This can be justified by decreasing attention (see also: Position Effects). This approach to information processing is seen as a mechanism to reduce complexity and to simplify personal assessment processes. However, the first impression is also a source of judgment bias.

Work (selection)

  • 1932: An experimental study of variability in learning. New York ( dissertation ).
  • 1952: Social Psychology , Prentice Hall. 1987 Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-852172-3
  • 1955: Opinions and social pressure. In: Scientific American , 193 (5), 31-35, reprinted in Sutermeister, Robert A. (Ed.), People and Productivity , McGraw-Hill, New York et al. a. 1963; 3rd edition 1976
  • 1956: Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against an unanimous majority. In: Psychological Monographs , 70 (9), 1-70.

literature

  • Rock, Irvin (ed.): The legacy of Solomon Asch: Essays in cognition and social psychology . Psychology Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8058-0440-9
  • Rozin, Paul: Social psychology and science: Some lessons from Solomon Asch. Personality and Social Psychology Review 5.1 (2001): 2-14.
  • Ceraso, John, H. Gruber, I. Rock: On Solomon Asch. The legacy of Solomon Asch: Essays in cognition and social psychology (1990): 3-19.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/29/us/solomon-asch-is-dead-at-88-a-leading-social-psychologist.html
  2. ↑ Routledge 2004.
personal data
SURNAME Asch, Solomon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Asch, Solomon Elliot
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-American gestalt psychologist and pioneer of social psychology
DATE OF BIRTH September 14, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw
DATE OF DEATH February 20, 1996
Place of death Haverford , Pennsylvania