The Legacy of Solomon Asch

Essays in Cognition and Social Psychology

Irvin Rock, Irvin Rock - DECEASED, Irvin Rock, Irvin Rock - DECEASED

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317784579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This volume honors Solomon Asch, a pioneer in social psychology whose experiments in this field are considered classic. Asch has made important contributions to the fields of memory, learning and thinking, and perception along with extending Gestalt theories to social psychology research. Former students and colleagues honor Asch with essays that either expand on his research or describe original research on new topics of related interest. An interesting and informative text for faculty and researchers in the fields of cognition and perception as well as social, experimental, and personality psychology.

I BIOGRAPHY

1 On Solomon Asch

John Ceraso

Rutgers University

Irvin Rock

University of California, Berkeley

Howard Gruber

Teachers College, Columbia University

Solomon Eliot Asch, whom his friends call Shlaym, was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1907, but grew up in Lowicz, a little town not far from Warsaw:

A small religious environment where the relation of people to the forces around them was very near and strong. In that setting man is very important, not just to himself, he’s important in the scheme of things, and this feeds an interest in human nature.

I was brought up at a time of great anxieties, big fears, great dangers. But I remember a little incident of another kind when I was a child. I must have been about seven. The war [WWI] had just started; it was Passover evening and there was the first Seder. Everything was prepared; it was a glowing ceremony, and we children were up late for the first time. Then I saw my grandmother fill a cup of wine for each of us including the children; and in addition, another cup. Then I saw a chair in which nobody sat. I was sitting next to an uncle of mine and I asked what this meant. He said that the prophet Elijah comes into every Jewish home on Passover. That is why there is a chair prepared for him, and at the proper moment in the ceremony the door is opened to admit him and that he takes a sip of the cup of wine meant for him.

I was completely fascinated and astounded that the prophet Elijah would in one night stop at all the Jewish homes in the world. I said to my uncle, “will he really take a sip?” and he said, “oh yes, you just watch when the time comes, watch the cup.”—it was filled to the brim—“and you’ll see that it goes down.” And when the moment came, my eyes were glued to the Prophet’s cup; I looked and looked and then it seemed to me as if perhaps it did go down a little! Well, except for a few details, that is just about the story of an experiment I was to do years later as part of the group pressure studies.

In that variation, as in others, there was a standard line and three comparison lines. The task was to choose one of three lines equal to the standard. Is this clear? One of the three lines was markedly longer—or shorter—than the standard; no one chose it. The other two lines were equal to the standard and to one another; thus there were two correct alternatives. The majority that preceded the critical subject was always correct, always choosing an equal line. In addition, the majority was always unanimous: it always chose the same equal line, but shied away from the other. In short, the majority was correct, unanimous and one-sided.

Under these conditions ninety per cent of the minority subjects went with the majority, shunning the other correct alternative. This was by far the strongest pro-majority effect I obtained. However, the significance of this effect was not the same as in the main body of the study: the effect was not mainly about independence. Here the relevant question shifts: why did these minority subjects stay so close to their majorities? The answer is hardly in doubt. The minority noticed the features of the situation, and in particular wondered about the unchosen and equal line. They reported that the rejected, equal line was ‘almost’ but ‘not quite’ equal to the standard. The procedure created a doubt that was decisive. In this case there was safety in numbers. No such doubt attached to the chosen line.

Don’t ask whether what happened to me at the age of seven was responsible for an experiment that came forty years later—I don’t know. When I thought or talked about it, the Passover incident would come back to me. As far as I can remember, the thought wasn’t there when I planned it. Still I came to think of it as my ‘Passover’ experiment’ (Gruber, 1971).

Along with a great many others, Asch’s family migrated to the United States in 1920. They lived on the Lower East Side of New York, then a haven for many immigrants—Jews, Italians, Irish.

His wife, Florence, tells what it was like for him to come to a new country:

A naturally reserved, very shy boy of thirteen (he once said, “it was easier for me not to breathe than not to be shy”) and without language! Shlaym learned English by reading Dickens. He was put into the 6th grade of P.S. 147, the neighborhood public school. His most vivid memory of that early period was a complete inability to comprehend what was said. Slowly he began to catch on, and 1½, or 2 years later he found himself in Townsend Harris High School (Asch, F., 1989).

That school was attached to the City College of New York and admission was selective. It is remarkable that when Asch was at Rutgers-Newark, Gruber, Lehrman, and Rock, three other members of the Psychology Department, had also attended this small elite high school.

After Townsend Harris, Shlaym went to City College where he majored in both literature and science, earning a Bachelor of Science in 1928, age 21.

Toward the end of my undergraduate days, I heard that there was a science called psychology, and I assumed—wrongly—that its concerns coincided with mine. So you might almost say that I came into psychology by mistake. I had formed my impression of what psychology might be from reading William James and a philosopher here and there—Santayana, Royce (Gruber, 1971).

In spite of the gap between his own concerns about human nature and the kind of psychology he was exposed to in his first courses, Asch went on to graduate studies at Columbia University. While he did not work much in social psychology at Columbia, he was attracted to anthropology, and attended seminars with Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas. Later, this led to a summer fellowship arranged by Gardner and Lois Murphy, with the help of Boas and Benedict. It permitted the Aschs to spend a summer in observations of Hopi children. The aim was to explore how the children became members of their culture; how they became “Hopified.” Based on this experience he wrote a paper, “Personality development of Hopi children” (Asch, 1932a). It was unpublished, but was cited briefly by Klineberg (1940), and at some length by Murphy, Murphy, and Newcomb (1937). Among the anecdotes cited is one he used later in his teaching, although his students were hardly aware that Asch had been the observer:

The teacher, a Mid-Westerner who was trying to inculcate American ways in the Hopi, sent some children to the blackboard to do an arithmetic problem, asking them to face the class as soon as they were done. Instead:

The quickest children, when they were through, waited and looked about inconspicuously to their right and left, and when all were ready, they all turned around together. Needless to say, the teacher had to abandon this practice. (Asch, 1932a, cited in Murphy et al., 1937).

His master’s thesis was done under the supervision of Woodworth. The research (Asch, 1929) was a dry statistical analysis of data provided by Woodworth of the test scores of 200 children (although Asch still believes there was an interesting idea in it). Except for a certain careful way of presenting things, one does not, strain as one may, hear Asch speaking in his own voice. There are a few sentence order inversions and other oddities that remind us of his European origins. This and the dryness of style are in sharp contrast to his later masterful and eloquent prose.

Asch was married to Florence Miller in 1930, and their son, Peter (now a Professor of Economics at Rutgers University), was born in 1937. The unity and steadfastness of his intellectual life are matched by the steady quality of his long marriage to Florence. Anyone who has seen them together knows what an easy, good-humored rapport there is in that household.

Florence Asch (1989) tells of their first meeting:

Where did we meet? In a library of course—where else? On East Broadway on the famous Lower East Side (where we lived a few blocks away from each other—but wrote each other constantly) the home of the Jewish intelligentsia, and working class. What a wonderful library that was. I haven’t seen such a beloved library before or since—including the Bodleian. I can still remember the way the sun shone thru the windows—and its special smell. The books were old and well-thumbed. When new books arrived, not often, they became old in two weeks—everybody scrambled for them. On Friday nights after the library closed (at 9 P.M.) everybody went walking on East Broadway. There was loud talk and much argument. Two favorite topics: “What is the meaning of life?”, “Is there a God.” The first time we met in the library (1926), Shlaym asked to walk me home. He told me years later that he never knew how he got the courage.

Asch’s doctoral dissertation (Asch, 1932b) was on a problem that was given to him, as was commoner then than now, by his supervisor, H. E. Garrett, who: “wanted me to find out whether all learning curves had the same form. You can see the Middle Ages from which I date, so I don’t like to think about that study at all.” A little quaintly, the title page of the published version identifies him as “Tutor, Department of Philosophy, Brooklyn College.”

Something important happened to Asch at Columbia. He tells about this in describing an episode that will probably sound familiar to every experimental psychologist.

When I was a graduate student at Columbia, maybe in my second or third year, something happened to me suddenly as I was sitting in the psychology reading room reading a paper by Thorndike on the law of effect. That law was a big thing in those days. Much revolved around it in that peculiar world. And then, for the first time, I had what seemed like an idea. I was quite shocked, because I thought of myself as one who studies what other people say and think. I had no clear notion I would ever do anything of the sort that these important people were doing and though I was a shy youth, I immediately rushed down to the Department Chairman and talked to him about the problem. I didn’t even give myself a chance to think about it, and told him I would like to work on it.

Now the problem was a curious one. I was reading an experiment in which Thorndike had people look at lines of different lengths—having them judge the lengths, but he didn’t give them information about their accuracy. Thorndike was trying to show that without such information, they won’t improve their judgments. And, of course, information to Thorndike meant reward. If the subject said “two,” and you said “That’s right,” you were rewarding him. And I said to myself: But if the law of effect is right it should be possible for me to produce wrong judgments by following the law of effect. I’m going to show a person a set of lines in random order, and just ask him or her to say this is 1, the shortest line, that is line number 2, etc. Every time he gives a judgment I’ll tell him what the correct judgment is. But I’ll introduce one twist: in the middle of the set, say at lines 4 and 5, whenever he says 4, I’ll say 5, and whenever he says 5, correctly, I’ll say 4. Years later, I found a notebook with ideas, ideas about experiments and some questions, that I had kept while at Columbia. This was after I started the group pressure studies. I wasn’t particularly close to social psychology at Columbia, but there I found the plan for the group pressure study. I had completely forgotten it. When I read the notebook it was entirely new to me. (Gruber, 1971).

For Asch, the group pressure study was indeed a test of the law of effect, since the group is administering rewards and punishments which, according to the law of effect, should change the subjects’ judgments. There is a quasi-religious feeling in Asch’s objection to the arbitrariness of the law of effect. As he put it at one point, the laws of psychology must not be “just concocted by God.”

Unquestionably, Asch’s encounter with Gestalt psychology was the intellectual event of his life. He had some knowledge of it during his graduate student days. Gardner Murphy (1930), then a young faculty member at Columbia, gave Gestalttheorie a fairly full and very sympathetic treatment in his Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology. But it was not until Wertheimer came to the United States that Asch’s encounter with Gestalt thinking really took hold. He recalled: “When I read in the New York Times one day that Wertheimer was coming to the New School for Social Research (later also known as the University in Exile) as a refugee, I said to myself that I must see him.” (Gruber, 1971).

Note that Gestalt psychology did not just happen to Asch, he sought it out. By the time he met Wertheimer he had completed his formal training, so he never actually studied with him, but did get to know him well. It was not only the technical side of Gestalt psychology that drew him, but:

Wertheimer’s inner qualities, the way he looked at psychological questions. They were for him more than simply technical questions that we had to study. He had a truly aesthetic approach. When he of spoke of certain ways of thinking as “ugly,” he meant it. He represented to me a kind of ideal of what a psychologist should be. For the first time I was meeting a man whose range of interest and whose concern with human questions was what psychology needed. It was exactly the dimension I had not encountered in anyone before, or, I might add, since. (Gruber, 1971)

It is true, as we have seen, that Asch had certain developed interests antedating this encounter: his youthful and abiding interest in human nature, his immersion, willy nilly, in research on learning, and his concern for problems of meaning and truth. But all these interests were assimilated into the context of Gestalt theory, and thereby transformed.

During the early 1940s, while at Brooklyn College (where he began his teaching career), he was editing the manuscript of Wertheimer’s Productive Thinking (published in 1937). Asch used the unpublished work as the basis for his course on the psychology of thinking. His personal relationship with Max Wertheimer lasted until the latter’s death in 1943. He then replaced his mentor as chairman of the psychology department at the New School.

At Brooklyn College Asch had a powerful impact on the lives of a number of students, among them Howard Gruber and Dorothy Dinnerstein; both later joined him to form the Institute for Cognitive Studies at Rutgers. He collaborated with colleagues Max Hertzman and Helen Block Lewis on studies of stereotyping and halo effects in social judgments. Dinnerstein and Gruber worked with Asch and Witkin on the studies of the perception of the upright and discovered that performance on that task was related to gender and personality. Dinnerstein also worked with Asch on his Social Psychology, and, at Swarthmore, on the group pressure studies.

One of us (Gruber) reports his early recollections of Asch:

My very first class in psychology was a lecture, at Brooklyn College, by Shlaym, replacing the regular teacher, Witkin, who was absent that day. It must have been in September, 1939. Shlaym talked about the Lewin, Lippit, and White experiments on experimental social climates. I was enthralled. So from the very first day, the pertinence of scientific psychology to social issues was a given.

Later, I took a course on the psychology of thinking with Shlaym. We went over Wertheimer’s Productive Thinking, working from the manuscript that Shlaym was editing. I was often the one who went to the blackboard and explained how I had solved a geometry problem. Wertheimer’s book became for me the standard to strive for, and he and Asch have always been looking over my shoulder during my work on thinking.

Shlaym was in Ithaca for a time when I was a graduate student at Cornell. I remember a conversation we had about materialism while taking a walk. I used the old argument, if I kick a stone I feel it. By the consequences of our actions we know the world, and that is its reality; something like that. Shlaym replied in his super-dignified way—that the question was too important for such an easy answer. I was impressed, and since then have always thought of Shlaym as the person who directed me toward the importance of deepening an inquiry.

Asch was beginning his group pressure work just as I left for the army in January or February of 1943. The word reached me from friends: “people stick to their guns!” It was electrifying. Then he moved from Brooklyn College and started finding that the number of “yielders”—even in this perceptually highly structured situation—was disappointingly large. We have all had to learn to swallow that result, along with the lessons of the Nazi successes, and with the findings of Zimbardo and Milgram telling us that conformity is international.

I regard my shadow box research (see Chapter 9 in this volume) as a part of that story, an attempt to study the conditions under which people can synthesize different perspectives and thereby transcend the limitations of a single point of view. It is not about conformity or nonconformity, but about some aspects of the search for truth, and that is a preoccupation that goes back to my early contacts with Asch.

Another of us (Rock) met Asch a few years later at the New School for Social Research and has this to say:

I first met Shlaym...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Frontmatter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Biography
• Part II Social Psychology
• Part III Cognition
• Part IV Perception
• Part V Gestalt Psychology
• Author Index
• Subject Index