In those days, his biggest problems had been finding a house for Ellen and the kids, keeping up his publications, and wondering whether UCSD would give him tenure. Norman’s research was considered brilliant, but psychology was notoriously prone to intellectual fashions, and interest in the study of anxiety was declining as many researchers came to regard anxiety as a purely biochemical disorder that could be treated with drug therapy alone; one scientist had even gone so far as to say, “Anxiety is no longer a problem in psychology. There is nothing left to study.” Similarly, group dynamics was perceived as old-fashioned, a field that had seen its heyday in the Gestalt encounter groups and corporate brainstorming procedures of the early 1970s but now was dated and passe.

Norman himself could not comprehend this. It seemed to him that American society was increasingly one in which people worked in groups, not alone; rugged individualism was now replaced by endless corporate meetings and group decisions. In this new society, group behavior seemed to him more important, not less. And he did not think that anxiety as a clinical problem was going to be solved with pills. It seemed to him that a society in which the most common prescription drug was Valium was, by definition, a society with unsolved problems.

Not until the preoccupation with Japanese managerial techniques in the 1980s did Norman’s field gain a new hold on academic attention. Around the same time, Valium dependence became recognized as a major concern, and the whole issue of drug therapy for anxiety was reconsidered. But in the meantime, Johnson spent several years feeling as if he were in a backwater. (He did not have a research grant approved for nearly three years.) Tenure, and finding a house, were very real problems.