Anxiety when confronted by unknown life has not been sufficiently appreciated. The fears unleashed by contact with a new life form are not understood and cannot be entirely predicted in advance. But the most likely consequence of contact is absolute terror.”

Barnes snapped the folder shut. “You remember who said that?”

“Yes,” Norman said. “I do.”

And he remembered why he had said it.

As part of the NSC grant, Norman had conducted studies of group dynamics in contexts of psychosocial anxiety. Following the procedures of Asch and Milgram, he constructed several environments in which subjects did not know they were being tested. In one case, a group of subjects were told to take an elevator to another floor to participate in a test. The elevator jammed between floors. Subjects were then observed by hidden video camera.

There were several variations to this. Sometimes the elevator was marked “Under Repair”; sometimes there was telephone communication with the “repairman,” sometimes not; sometimes the ceiling fell in, and the lights went out; and sometimes the floor of the elevator was constructed of clear lucite.

In another case, subjects were loaded into a van and driven out into the desert by an “experiment leader” who ran out of gas, and then suffered a “heart attack,” thus stranding the subjects.

In the most severe version, subjects were taken up in a private plane, and the pilot suffered a “heart attack” in mid-air. Despite the traditional complaints about such tests-that they were sadistic, that they were artificial, that subjects somehow sensed the situations were contrived-Johnson gained considerable information about groups under anxiety stress.

He found that fear responses were minimized when the group was small (five or less); when group members knew each other well; when group members could see each other and were not isolated; when they shared defined group goals and fixed time limits; when groups were mixed age and mixed gender; and when group members had high phobic-tolerant personalities as measured by LAS tests for anxiety, which in turn correlated with athletic fitness.