| Asch received the Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1932. He taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City and at Rutgers University. He was a close friend and colleague of Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of the Gestalt school of
psychology. In 1952 he wrote a text. Social psychology, much in keeping with the tenets of Gestalt
psychology. He is best known for a series of experiments (1956) on the effects of group pressure on a single individual. In these experiments the situation was so contrived that all members of a group were in collusion except one. For example, subjects were asked to compare the length of lines as longer or shorter. Those in collusion purposely made incorrect judgments, so the single naive subject was caught between what he or she wanted to report and what was reported by the other members of the group. The general tendency was for the single subject to go along with the reports of his peers, despite the fact that his or her own sensory discriminations indicated
otherwise. With an increase in the size of the majority group, the pressure toward conformity was strengthened. Conformity did not occur for all subjects. Some maintained their independence in what they judged to be correct, going against the consensus of the
majority. |
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