(in, American Sociological Review, vol. 23, 1958, pp. 50-56.)
The following is quoted from the end of their article which focuses in on the ongoing, interactive process of anticipatory socialization as a part of the professional training of medical practitioners.
"A final complication arises because cynicism and idealism are not merely attributes of the actor, but are dependent on the person doing the attributing as they are on the qualities of the individual to whom they are attributed. Though the student may see his own disregard of the unique personal troubles of a particular patient as proper scientific objectivity, the layman may view this objectivity as heartless cynicism."
"...we can now summarize the transformations of these characteristics as we have seen them occurring among medical students. Some of the student's idealism at the outset is a reaction against the lay notion, of which they are uncomfortably aware, that doctors are money-hungry cynics; they counter this with an idealism of similar lay origin stressing the doctor's devotion to service. But this idealism soon meets a setback, as students find that it will not be relevant for a while, since medical school has, it seems, little relation to the practice of medicine, as they see it. ....the students "agree" to set this idealism aside in favor of a realistic approach to the problem of getting through school. This approach, which we have labeled as the cynicism specific to the school experience, serves as a protection for the earlier grandiose feelings about medicine by postponing their exposure to reality to a distant future. As that future approaches near the end of the four years and its possible mistreatment of their ideals moves closer, the students again worry about maintaining their integrity, this time in actual medical practice..."
"We can put this in propositional form by saying that when a man's ideals are challenged by outsiders and then further strained by reality, he may salvage them by postponing their application to a future time when conditions are expected to be more propitious."
Needless to say, that "imagined" future may never arrive, or when it does; new, unanticipated conditions (or others) may work to alter one's ideals.
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