Social class is astonishingly multidimensional as pointed out in the works of C. Wright Mills (Power Elite), Paul Fussel (Class), Tom Wolfe (The Pump House Gang), etc.
In my extended family there are no college professors, but a lot of cops, even a lot of women that are cops. (There are some accountants, but they are forensic accountants ;-)
When I get stopped by the cops I don't worry, they like my attitude, they will tell me that people don't like speeding in their residential neighborhood and to them I look more like a guy who doesn't like speeding in my residential neighborhood and not the kind of guy who likes to play Initial D in residential neighborhoods.
Sometimes I've been a bystander when it looked like the cops showed up to arrest the first black person they saw, or when 15 police vehicles show up to arrest some black guy as thin as a rail and I even have a friend who grew up in a much richer family than me who had a bad attitude towards the police and has had his ass kicked, etc. Somehow though, even though I am not a cop and I don't particularly see things the way cops do, I've somehow absorbed enough protective coloration that I have a lot of "privilege" in this area, and less in some other areas.
Fussel's Class was sort of OK, but then he went on a wish-fulfillment tripe dump, whereupon he wished college professors like himself to be above it all.
Class is probably Fussel's hardest book to rip up. Look at Muscle, the book he ghost wrote for his son to find out what he really thinks.
To be fair when a graduate student I knew had an absentee PhD supervisor and a nervous breakdown and tried the "experiment" of not showing up for work and seeing how long it took for the paychecks to stop, the "experiment" strung on for most of a year until his dad realized he had no idea how to get in touch with his son, called up the department, and they called me up.
He had managed department failing department stores for decades and he thought our college town was a "dump" because it didn't have a Nordstrom's.
The social position of the college professor has changed a lot since Fussel's generation. Up until 1970 or so it was a path of upward social mobility, but a slowdown of tenure track hiring, social changes that doubled the number of professor's kids that could be recruited (counterbalanced enough by massive imports of male graduate students from hyperpatriarchical cultures to not threaten feminoid narriatives) mean it is no longer a path to social mobility, unless you mean trading a life of baking cookies at an organic cafe 9-5 to working 80 hours a week at 5 different colleges spread out over 200 miles while eating off food stamps...
Think it's very possible that you believe law enforcement thinks about the world differently than someone trying to avoid law enforcement.
My understanding is that they share the same mental model of the world on average; which is not a critical view of either, just what I've heard from people that know much, much more about how different types of people think than me.
To be clear, it would be foolish to say all people, even of a given type, think the same.
To be clear, it would be foolish to say all people, even of a given type, think the same.
This statement doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
One of the main purposes of training for many jobs (lawyers, physicists, police, etc.) is explicitly to modify the mental model you apply to the world.
I found his comment interesting but I don't know what to think about it.
Certainly cops and criminals have plenty of reason to get into each other's heads.
Maybe a better analogy could be the rift that exists between police and the black communities in many places. Definitely these people have a different perspective about things. There is definitely a hard core of criminals who are coincidentally black who are playing a "cat and mouse" game against the cops, but then there are a lot of blacks who have surplus trouble with the police as well as situations like
It's a clear case where there is a gap between a community segment and the police and also my original comment was about my own experience of what seems to be "hyper white privilege" in terms of grooving along abnormally well with the cops.
Point is there are exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions. While I'd agree that mental induction into a field does happen, that unlike in many fields, law enforcement has a very primal nature, and many that take on this domain are predoposed to it; within nature, the domain would be the relationship between predators and their prey.
Honestly didn't mean to have a "tone" - unless you mean my comment about evolutionary psychology, which is just balderdash in general.
Anyway, I can't really see the connection you trying to make, are you saying that something innate to (some of) the people who choose policing as a career overrides their training? Or that police training is in some particular way unsuccessful in modifying mental models?
Yes, your response to evolutionary psychology was not constructive in my opinion; also, just to be clear, I'm very sure I make tone mistakes too. As for evolutionary psychology, I see your point, and happy with leaving it at that; meaning evolutionary psychology, like much of the field is not a science.
Any rate, what I am saying is that some types of personalities (that develop prior entering a life of crime or law enforcement) predispose individuals to enter either one, the other, or both.
Special forces has a saying, that is, you're either born to be a seal, or you're not; which is to say, training will never make you something that you're not, but it will weed out those that can't be trained; reference the seals, since they're at the extreme of having a very develop mental model prior to training.
Ok, I'm not sure I agree with you entirely but now I can make sense of your point.
I think there is probably some truth in what you are saying, and some pure selection bias. However, I also believe that there are many modifications to ones mental models that happen through training - that a) are probably very opaque to the recipient and b) do not occur naturally/intuitively almost ever.
dont really think its that certain types of individuals being drawn to law enforcement, or rather i think that is true but i dont think thats the largest factor. I do not think its so much the type individual as the type of situation.
Meaning I think when you put people into primal life or death situations which require split second decision making a lot of instinctual processes take over.
In my extended family there are no college professors, but a lot of cops, even a lot of women that are cops. (There are some accountants, but they are forensic accountants ;-)
When I get stopped by the cops I don't worry, they like my attitude, they will tell me that people don't like speeding in their residential neighborhood and to them I look more like a guy who doesn't like speeding in my residential neighborhood and not the kind of guy who likes to play Initial D in residential neighborhoods.
Sometimes I've been a bystander when it looked like the cops showed up to arrest the first black person they saw, or when 15 police vehicles show up to arrest some black guy as thin as a rail and I even have a friend who grew up in a much richer family than me who had a bad attitude towards the police and has had his ass kicked, etc. Somehow though, even though I am not a cop and I don't particularly see things the way cops do, I've somehow absorbed enough protective coloration that I have a lot of "privilege" in this area, and less in some other areas.