Professional deformation is a term for cognitive distortion, which is associated with changes in personality on the basis of professional activity. You can read a more detailed description in Wikipedia, but I want to look at this problem from a different angle.
First of all, the very notion of deformation seems strange. The most common example of professional deformation is a functional (close in meaning the word — manipulative) attitude to people professionals professions where you need to communicate with people a lot. These professions include teachers, psychologists, politicians, law enforcement officials, various leaders and so on.
But the question arises. If these people have long been taught specific methods of working with people, why do we call it deformation, when specialists finally mastered these techniques and apply them in their lives? It's more about a narrowly focused and competent view of things.
If we want to use the word “deformation”, it is necessary to use it in all aspects of life: for education (educational strain), learning (school strain), personal thoughts (individual strain) to the gastronomic tastes (food strain) etc. Any exposure of humans leads to changes in it. But why highlight it at all?
And so it is clear that any of our experience and any of our knowledge change our attitude to the world. We strive to apply this knowledge and use it for our own benefit. So, the employee of law enforcement agencies learns to communicate with people who constantly try to lie to him. It is quite natural that soon he gains such experience that already on the first words of the person to the employee it is clear that to him now will weave. And it is clear that he finds ways to counteract such behavior.
What's so strange about him using such a wonderful skill in everyday life? Should we call deformation something that makes us completely superior to other people in a certain aspect of life?
So is there a professional deformity or not?
There are some, but it's not about the profession. The fact is that a person who is engaged in the same activity for a long period of time, acquires patterns of behavior that he begins to use on the machine. A person simply stops thinking, which is why he begins to make mistakes in judgments.
This process concerns not only professional activity, but in General any. A person who, for example, prepares soup every day, achieves quite great success in this. Over time, he ceases to even try this soup, because he so fills his hand that it is unnecessary for him. Unnecessary until something changes in the products and his wonderful soup will not be so wonderful, and he did not even notice.
Any person tends to use the strategies that he worked well. We strive to influence the world with what we have. If a person is used to achieve what he needs with the help of aggression, then it's not a professional deformation, but the fact that he has nothing better.
Let me give you an analogy with machines. Do you think the tank is deformed compared to the car? No! Simply, it is designed to push machines with tracks. A tractor deformed? No! It is perfectly adapted to plough the field. The term “professional deformation " comes from the desire to equate everything to some ideal norm, which does not exist in nature. Do not confuse deformation with fitness.
The same bad thing that we mean by this term is the lack of flexibility, laziness, emotional unrest, in a word, what all people are subject to, including those who do not have any profession at all. For the most part, the effects of professional deformation are explained by rigidity (lack of flexibility) of thinking.
What is wrong with this term?
Me can argue, and what I at all latched on to wording? Who cares what you call it?
The difference, meanwhile, is very big, and it lies in the consequences of the “diagnosis”. If we say “professional deformity, " then the person who just got stupid and stopped thinking is presented with a great excuse. Professional deformation after all, we all it are subject to. It can't be helped.
How to deal with rigidity of thinking?
Rigidity of thinking can be fought in the simplest way — not to stop there. If we are not satisfied with the techniques and the knowledge that we already have, and continue to develop, learn new things, then it develops our brain. Our thinking remains alive and critical.