Deformation Professionnelle

Deformation professionnelle, French for professional deformation or job conditioning, is a tendency to view things from the standpoint of one's own profession or specialized expertise rather than from a broader or more humane perspective. The phrase is often translated as professional deformation, though the French word deformation can equally be translated as distortion, and the underlying implication is the same either way: that professional training and the socialization that comes with it can distort the way a person sees the world. The Nobel laureate Alexis Carrel captured the idea by observing that every specialist, because of a well known professional bias, believes he understands the entire human being, when in reality he grasps only a small part.