Solomon Asch

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• Born September 14, 1907 in Warsaw, Poland.
• Died February 20, 1996 in Haverford, Pennsylvania.
• Moved to the United States in 1920 at the age of 13.
• He lived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan

He attended the College of the City of New York and graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1928.He then went to Columbia University, where he was mentored by Max Wertheimer and earned his master's degree in 1930 and his Ph.D. in 1932.

Solomon Asch began studying the impact of propaganda and indoctrination while he was a professor at Brooklyn College's psychology department. He also served as a professor for 19 years at Swarthmore College, where he worked with renowned Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler.

Asch became famous for his series of experiments (known as the Asch conformity experiments) that demonstrated the effects of social pressure on conformity.

In Asch's experiments, students were told that they were participating in a 'vision test.' Unbeknownst to the subject, the other participants in the experiment were all confederates, or assistants of the experimenter. At first, the confederates answered the questions correctly, but eventually began providing incorrect answers.

Nearly 75 percent of the participants in the conformity experiments went along with the rest of the group at least one time. After combining the trials, the results indicated that participants conformed to the incorrect group answer approximately one-third of the time.

When just one other confederate was present, there was virtually no impact on participants' answers. The presence of two confederates had only a tiny effect. The level of conformity seen with three or more confederates was far more significant