Although the voices of professional psychologists became more numerous and audible in postwar America, they hardly constituted a monopoly on discussions about psychology and modern life. Other experts on human behavior, such as sociologists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists, offered their views to an eager public, as did various critics and commentators. The extent and variety of discourse on “the psychological society” seemed to indicate that psychology had moved to the forefront of public consciousness.

The notion that Americans lived in a “psychological society” took hold rapidly in the 1950s and had become a commonplace by the 1960s. Contemporary awareness of the changing social environment was stimulated by works that plumbed the meaning of modern life. Many commentators, both inside and outside academe, framed their analysis in terms of the relations between personality and culture. Among the first studies to appear after the war was David Riesman's evocatively titled book The Lonely Crowd (1950), which explored the personality characteristics of people living in a mass society, particularly the shift in the location of people's moral compass from within themselves (“inner-directedness”) to outside agents (“other-directedness”). His concern over the decline of individualism was shared by William H. Whyte, Jr., a writer for Fortune magazine. In The Organization Man (1956), he traced the rise of a set of values that privileged collective belonging, whether to a corporation, research enterprise, or other group.