Asch, Solomon E. (Solomon Elliott), 1907-1996

Solomon Asch 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 his Bachelor of Science degree from the College of the City of New York in 1928. Asch received both his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1930 and 1932, respectively. He had been a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College for 19 years, working with psychologists including Wolfgang Kohler. Asch also taught at Brooklyn College, the New School for Social Research, and held visiting posts at Harvard and MIT. He was a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and director of the Institute for Cognitive Studies at Rutgers University from 1966-1972, when he joined the University of Pennsylvania. Asch received many awards and distinctions during his career, as well as serving in varied capacities for professional organizations. Asch served as associate editor for the journal Psychological Review from the years 1957 to 1962. Asch became famous in the 1950s for his experiments which demonstrated the power of conformity in groups. Asch's most famous experiments set a contest between actual physical reality and perceived social reality.

Asch died on February 20, 1996 at the age of 89.

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