Solomon Eliot Asch (September 14, 1907 – February 20, 1996) was a Polish-American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Asch as the 41st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

They lived on the Lower East Side of New York, a dense area of many Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants.

[6] Asch was shy when he moved to the United States and did not speak English fluently due to being brought up in Poland.

[6] Asch was exposed to Gestalt psychology through Gardner Murphy, then a young faculty member at Columbia.

Peter Asch became a professor of economics at Rutgers University, married Ruth Zindler and had two sons, Eric and David.

Wolfgang Kohler, a German immigrant, W. C. H. Prentice and Hans Wallach were faculty members at that time as well.

[citation needed] During his time at Swarthmore, Asch also served for two years (1958-1960) as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

[10] Asch reached the following conclusions based on this experiment: "In [Set] 3 slowness indicates care, prides in work well-done.

[6] In everyday life, psychologists noticed that people are persuaded by messages differently based on the identity of the author.

[11] Asch called into question the present theory for the underlying psychological process concerning the effect of group forces on the formation and change of opinions and attitudes.

He critiqued the experimental approach of many different psychologists, including Zillig, Moore, Marple, Sherif, Thorndike, and Lorge, in their investigations of evaluation change.

[13] For example, the following quote was presented to both groups of subjects: "Only the willfully blind can fail to see that the old style capitalism of a primitive freebooting period is gone forever.

The capitalism of complete laissez-faire, which thrived on low wages and maximum profits for minimum turnover, which rejected collective bargaining and fought against justified public regulation of the competitive process, is a thing of the past."

When participants thought that Bridges (a well-known union leader) was the author, they interpreted the passage to be an "expression of the accomplishments of labor in the face of opposition from capital and contained a resolve to defend these gains from attack".

Asch conducted a very similar and classic study with participants reading statements either attributed to Jefferson or Lenin.

[13] One of Asch's major points is that participants are not completely blind in the experiment and make arbitrary choices based on this bias.

[11] Muzafer Sherif conducted an experiment, very similar to Lorge, in which he investigated how prestige affects the evaluation of literary materials.

[14] Asch suggested that Sherif's results could be largely influenced from the environment of a laboratory experiment.

The aim was to see whether the real participant would change his answer and respond the same way as the confederates or stick with what his eyes plainly told him.

[16] Asch found that 23% of all subjects successfully withstand this form of social pressure, 4.8% completely succumb, while the remainder conform to the majority's manifestly incorrect opinion only in some experimental rounds.

[15]: 10  Asch suggested that this procedure created a doubt in the participants' mind about the seemingly obvious answer.

Asch also found that the effectiveness of the group pressure increased significantly from 1 person to 3 people unanimously responding incorrectly.

He also found that when one confederate responded correctly, the power of the majority to influence the subject decreased substantially.

"Filled with a sense of suggestion and expectation" Asch "thought he saw the level of wine in the cup drop just a bit".

Asch looked at metaphors in a variety of different languages, such as Old Testament Hebrew, Homeric Greek, Chinese, Thai, Malayalam, and Hausa.

This was Asch's third influential idea, and he suggested that conformity and resistance might be explained by their own unique social psychological processes.

Although these exact terms have not been directly ported over to the literature, researchers such as Serge Moscovici and Charlan Nemeth have adopted the perspective that majority and minority influence are moderated by multiple processes.

This is the most obscure of Asch's major ideas, in large part because it has not been cited frequently, but is nonetheless important because it speaks to the power of group influence.

[29] Asch was worried that social psychologists were not asking the deeper questions that would help change and improve the world.