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Born: 1907 - Warsaw, Poland Solomon Asch was born in Poland in 1907. He came to the United States in 1920. After earning his Ph.D., he taught for several years at Brooklyn College. He spent 19 years on the faculty at Swarthmore College. After that, he taught at Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania. The great challenge for social psychology has been to merge the rigor of natural science with the rich complexity of human social life. Asch showed the way to blend natural and social science, as shown by his highly influential experiments and his well-regarded textbook. Asch conducted groundbreaking studies on independence and conformity under group pressure. His most famous experiments involved having subjects judge the relative length of lines after hearing other subjects give incorrect judgments on purpose. Only 29 percent of the test subjects refused to conform to the bogus majority. This technique allowed an examination of the social construction of reality, and gave rise to decades of research on conformity. Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience to authority were inspired directly by Asch's studies. Asch's classic 1952 textbook, Social Psychology,is thought to rank among the great books in psychology. The book shaped the thinking of a whole generation of social psychologists. Asch died at the age of 88 in 1996.
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