Solomon Asch

Solomon Eliot Asch was a Polish-American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. 

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.

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.

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

Asch died at the age of 88 on February 20, 1996, in his home in Haverford, Pennsylvania.