ABSTRACT
Perhaps the easiest way to introduce Solomon Asch is to say that he had a dedication to psychology as a natural science and a talent for arresting experiments, joined with the cultural knowledge and sensitivity of William James (chap. 2, Pioneers I). James was long gone by the time Asch came into psychology, and the complex humanity of Jamesian psychology was largely forgotten. Asch lived and worked in a mid-20th-century psychology dominated by behaviorist paradigms that were a reaction against the speculative excesses of psychoanalysis and Titchener's (chap. 7, Pioneers I) structuralism. For Asch, the behaviorists and the Freudians were alike in their reductionism. Asch aimed instead to represent the scope and depth of Homo sapiens in a Gestalt psychology that focused on context and relationships.
