Solomon Asch

Solomon Eliot Asch (September 14, 1907 – February 20, 1996) was a Polish-born American psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. Asch conducted seminal research on impression formation, prestige suggestion, and many other issues. He is most well known for his conformity experiments, in which he demonstrated the influence of group pressure on opinions. 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.