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Solomon Eliot Asch (September 14, 1907 – February 20, 1996) was a Polish-American Gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology. He created seminal pieces of work in impression formation, prestige suggestion, conformity , and many other topics.
In psychology, the Asch conformity experiments or the Asch paradigm were a series of studies directed by Solomon Asch studying if and how individuals yielded to or defied a majority group and the effect of such influences on beliefs and opinions.
The Asch experiment took place at Swarthmore College in 1951. Solomon Asch conducted an experiment to investigate the extent to which social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform. [33] Asch took 50 people from the college to participate in a vision test.
In 1955, Solomon Asch conducted his classic conformity experiments in an attempt to discover if people still conform when the right answer is obvious. [8] Specifically, he asked participants in his experiment to judge the similarity of lines, an easy task by objective standards.
Deutsch & Gérard (1955) designed different situations that variated from Asch' experiment and found that when participants were writing their answer privately, they gave the correct one. [37] Normative influence, a function of social impact theory, has three components. [41] The number of people in the group has a surprising effect. As the ...
An example of the line test given to experiment participants. In Solomon Asch's experiment, 50 participants were placed in separate ambiguous situations to determine the extent to which they would conform. Aside from a single participant, the 7 other experiment members were confederates—individuals who understood the aim of the study and had ...
Solomon Asch's work on conformity in the 1950s also helped shape the study of intergroup relations by exploring how the social pressures of group membership influence individuals to adhere their behavior, attitudes, and beliefs to group norms.
One of the best-known experiments on the topic is the 1950s' Asch conformity experiment, which illustrates the individual variation in the bandwagon effect. [14] [9] Academic study of the bandwagon effect especially gained interest in the 1980s, as scholars studied the effect of public opinion polls on voter opinions. [10]