Solomon Asch
Solomon E. Asch ( born 14 September 1907 in Warsaw, † February 20, 1996 in Haverford, Pennsylvania ) was a Polish- American figure psychologist and pioneer in social psychology.
Asch emigrated from Poland in 1920 in the United States. In 1932, he graduated from Columbia University with a Ph.D. from. For more than 19 years Asch was at Swarthmore College Professor of Psychology. There he worked with numerous psychologists including Wolfgang Köhler.
Asch became famous in the 1950s with experiments like the conformity of Asch experiment that showed how pressure to conform can affect a person so that they rated an obviously false statement to be correct.
With his theses he had a lasting effect the work of the psychologist Stanley Milgram and served as his doctoral advisor at Harvard University. Also S. Asch worked with H. Witkin together in the development of the theory of cognitive styles. Early 1970s provided Asch's experiments, among others a Mitanstoß for the theory of spiral of silence by Elisabeth Noelle - Neumann.
The Asch paradigm of impression formation
In an attempt to put Asch impression formation subjects with a list of adjectives of a ( fictional) person. Subsequently, the subject was asked to write an essay on the person characterized.
Characteristics / adjectives:
- A person is skilled, hardworking, friendly, determined, practical, careful.
- Person B is sent, hardworking, cold, determined, practical, careful.
Person A was due to the characteristics mentioned in the articles of the subject and also their assessments with respect to other characteristics of the individuals, the subjects were estimated to be very different. For example, Person A Person B was considered by most to be generous, probably not. The exchange of friendly by cold has apparently caused this effect. In this experiment, the properties proved friendly ( in the original: warm) and cold as central. But friendly and cold proved to be not always central. The properties themselves have been interpreted completely differently in different contexts. Friendly meant in combination with obedient, weak, superficial, warm, little ambitious, vain other than in the combinations listed above. Asch concludes that the overall impression of a person can not be explained by the sum of the available information and features of individual. The overall impression is more than the sum of its parts.
The first impression
In addition, Asch found that the information given first used about a person as the basis for the classification of the following information. This can be explained by a decreasing attention. (see also: position effects ). This approach to information processing is a mechanism to reduce complexity and simplify personal assessment processes. However, the first impression is also a source of distortions of judgment.