Solomon Asch - Definition and Overview

Solomon E. Asch (September 14, 1907 - February 20, 1996) was a world-renowned Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. He was born in Warsaw, Poland, and emigrated to the United States in 1920. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1932. He had been a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College for 19 years, working with psychologists including Wolfgang Köhler.

He became famous in the 1950s, following experiments which showed how the effect of social pressure can make a person believe an obviously wrong opinion is correct.

He inspired the work of the controversial psychologist Stanley Milgram and supervised his PhD at Harvard University.

Notable contributions

• Asch conformity experiments
• Halo effect
• Primacy effect

External link

• The Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict (http://www.psych.upenn.edu/sacsec/)