Norman Anderson considers himself very lucky. He was working for a consulting engineering company when he decided to go back to school to get his Ph.D. Rather than pursue a degree in his undergraduate major (physics) or continue in the area of his master's (mathematics) he wanted to pursue a degree in psychology, which he felt would help in his work with man-machine systems—systems in which the functions of a human operator and a machine are integrated.

But as luck would have it, when he began his graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin everything changed; he discovered his niche wasn't in man-machine systems, it was in psychology which gradually evolved into social psychology.

“My first year as a psychology grad student was very challenging,” he recalls. “I had to get used to a field in which everything was uncertain—in physics and math, questions had definite answers. But I survived and entered into a new life of which I had never dreamed. I was enormously lucky!”

After earning his doctorate, Anderson taught at UCLA before accepting an offer in 1965 to join the new psychology department at the fledgling UC San Diego campus, where he's been ever since. Now professor emeritus of Psychology, Anderson hasn't slowed down much—he still conducts research and teaches one course a year.

“The only real difference is that I don't have to attend faculty meetings anymore,” he admits.

Anderson is currently working on his ninth (and he says “final”) book called “Moral Algebra.” Like his other books and research, the focus is on the General Theory of Information Integration. Anderson proposed this theory to describe and model how a person integrates information from a number of sources in order to make an overall judgment.

“My students and I discovered that much of human cognition and judgment is governed by simple algebraic laws and the most common is averaging law,” he explains. “For example, the likableness of a person described by several personality traits or deeds is an average of the values of those traits or deeds, or the judged statesmanship of past U.S. presidents is an average of the good and bad deeds of their administration.”

According to Anderson, these laws have been found in virtually every area of human psychology, even in children as young as four years-old.

“Algebraic laws are something people have dreamed about ever since Aristotle,” he says. “It just took new theory and method to reveal them, and we were extremely lucky to do so. Most interesting ideas don't work out very well—the history of psychology is littered with dead ends and blind alleys.”

Indeed, Anderson says these laws opened a new horizon in psychology, which had for years been narrowly focused on questions about sensory systems like vision, rote learning of verbal material and stimulus-response conditioning.

“Those questions took on a life of their own and held psychology within narrow bounds that neglected moral judgment, understanding of other persons, and social attitudes,” he says.

But not anymore.

“I tell my students that we're in the 'Golden Age of Psychology,'” he says. “The field is wide open for new ideas and new phenomena to be explored. It's like the discovery of America to the medieval Europeans. I'm remarkably lucky to be a part of it.”