Occupational Psychosis 💼
🧠 Psych - 90 / 100
Hey,
This is the 90th edition of this newsletter. I would like to thank you for being part of Psych. We’ll soon be celebrating the one year anniversary :)
For now, let’s talk about Occupational Psychosis. 💼
What is it?
When a person’s career or their occupation makes them highly biased and be inclined to specific norms which are not usual.
Examples -
John Dewey coined the term “occupational psychosis” to describe the ways in which one’s occupation or job begin to warp his/her interaction with the world.
Pop culture is stuffed with examples:
the cop who becomes overly suspect of their friends and neighbors,
the psychiatrist who wants to analyze instead of interact with other people,
the advertising executive that reduces everything to marketability.
Where does it occur?
It is common in tight occupational circles, individuals can normalize ideas or behaviours that seem absurd or irrational to the external public.
Why do I need to know?
In these examples, the organizational culture in which one works creates a particular perspective, drawing and focusing a person’s attention, through accepted norms, repeated practices and specialized vocabulary–norms, practices and vocabularies which may appear out of step with larger society.
Occupational psychosis may help to give a worker better judgment (the suspicious cop becomes very good at detecting lies) but they have a negative side, that Thorstein Veblen calls a “trained incapacity,” a blindspot or bias.
For example, the suspicious cop may have trouble in personal relationships that value trust.
Takeaways: -
If you are fond of taking advices from people who have been serving in a niche, there is a chance that they might have biased opinions.
References & Studies: -
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23064005?seq=1
https://doxastic.wordpress.com/category/occupational-psychosis/
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