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Solomon Asch

Polish-American psychologist (1907–1996)

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  • 7 chapters

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As a proponent of Gestalt psychology, Asch's work reflects a common theme of that school of thought: that the whole is not only different from the sum of its parts, but the nature of the whole fundamentally alters our understanding of the parts. As he wrote in his book Social Psychology: "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".

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

Early life and education

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, at age 13, Asch emigrated with his family to the United States. They lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a dense neighborhood populated with Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants. His friends called him Shlaym.

Having been a shy child who was brought up in Poland, Asch initially did not speak English fluently. He attended sixth grade at his neighborhood's public school, P.S. 147. Because of the language barrier, Asch had difficulty understanding his teacher. He, however, 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 City College 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 number of other philosophers. In 1928, when he was 21 years old, he received his Bachelor of Science.

Asch went on to pursue a doctoral degree at Columbia University. He initially was interested in anthropology, not social psychology. With the help of Gardner Murphy, Lois Murphy, Franz Boas, and Ruth Benedict he obtained a summer fellowship and investigated how children become socialized into the surrounding cultural milieu. Under the supervision of Robert S. Woodworth, Asch's master's thesis involved a statistical analysis of the test scores of 200 children. He received his master's degree in 1930. For his doctoral dissertation, Asch examined commonalities of the form of learning curves; H. E. Garrett assigned the topic to him. He received his Ph.D. 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. Later, Asch and Wertheimer became close friends.

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