Solomon Asch - End of Life

End of Life

Asch was disappointed and concerned by the direction social psychology was going in the 1980s. He wrote, "Why do I sense, together with the current expansion, a shrinking of vision, an expansion of surface rather than depth, a failure of imagination?....Why is not social psychology more exciting, more human in the most usual sense of that term? To sum up, is this discipline perhaps on the wrong track?" (Asch, p. x) Asch was worried that social psychologists were not asking the deeper questions that would help the world improve. Asch died at the age of 88 on February 21, 1996 in his home in Haverford, Pa.