The Legacy of Solomon Asch

by Irvin Rock (Editor), Solomon E. Asch

This volume honors Solomon Asch, a pioneer in social psychology whose experiments in this field are considered classic. Asch has made important contributions to the fields of memory, learning and thinking, and perception along with extending Gestalt theories to social psychology research.
Former students and colleagues honor Asch with essays that either expand on his research or describe original research on new topics of related interest. An interesting and informative text for faculty and researchers in the fields of cognition and perception as well as social, experimental, and personality psychology.

Genres: Psychology, Sociology

318 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1990

About the author

Irvin Rock (1922–1995) was an American experimential psychologist who studied visual perception at the University of California at Berkeley.

His The Logic of Perception led to him being regarded as an excellent perception psychologist. Rock is notable in the field of psychology for his 1957 experiment where he tilted a square to make it look like a diamond and then tilted his test subjects and asked them what shape they saw. The experiment tested Rock's hypothesis that perceptual phenomena could be explained by higher-level mental processes instead of merely by automatic processes. When his test subjects continued to perceive the shape as a diamond after being tilted to view the shape as a square, Rock concluded that perception is an intelligent, higher-level mental process. This differed from previous conclusions by Gestalt psychologists that perception was not a higher-level process. Rock later wrote another important book on the field of inattentional blindness.