lifestyle for years, sometimes decades on end, it stands to reason
that they aren’t exactly after new experiences. Instead, where they
score high is precisely where you’d expect. These folks are after the
thrill and adventure of flight. It would be a nice personality profile
for this type of career.
As you move further down the list to police officers and
firefighters, the relationship between risk-taking and high sensa-
tion-seeking only becomes subtler and even more complex.^3
Certainly, being a police officer or a firefighter means you are
putting your life on the line and are therefore at risk, but it doesn’t
necessarily follow that high sensation-seekers are always the best
fit for these jobs. Indeed, a study done in Poland showed that fire-
fighters scored higher than everyday people only on the disinhibi-
tion scale (a trait one can easily see would be useful if you routinely
were expected to run into burning buildings). In addition, a study
that compared police officers to prison guards showed that police
officers only scored higher in thrill- and adventure-seeking.^4 The
prison guards (ostensibly a lower risk occupation) scored higher in
each of the other four categories. From a common-sense stand-
point, none of this seems to match up. After all, every night on TV
we watch the latest show about first responders performing stun-
ning, heroic deeds. I remember whenCSIfirst went on the air and
all of my students suddenly wanted to become investigators, ima-
gining they would spend their days seeking out clues and cracking
exotic cases. But the fact is, most police work is not like this at all.
Patrols walk their beats or cruise in their cars often for hours or
days at a time with little happening. Sure, there is bound to be the
occasional chase or encounter, but having a low tolerance for bore-
dom is certainly not one of the criteria for the job. In fact, many
police officers spend much of their careers in the station filing
paperwork or stuck on long, often boring stakeouts. For firefighters
the story is pretty much the same. They might sit for days in the
firehouse only to be called into action on a moment’s notice. So
being an experience and adventure-seeking type just doesn’t match
the profile.
I went to my local fire station to interview a few of the
firefighters about their experiences and their sensation-seeking.
There I met Firefighter Byrd. He remembers the conversation he
had with his mother about choosing a career as a firefighter. He
started to list off all the things he thought he wanted to do, hoping
for her approval.119 / All in a Day’s WorkDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:18:48, subject to the Cambridge