Shaping the Blue Mind: How Epistemic Culture Influences Epistemic Virtue and Democratic Attitudes in Police Education

Social epistemologists argue that epistemic virtues are socially cultivated, yet this claim has rarely been tested longitudinally. We analyse a three-wave survey (N = 200) of German police recruits to examine how perceived epistemic culture in a police academy shapes individual virtues and democratic attitudes. The overall effect of early culture perceptions on virtue development was modest. However, a perceived culture of humility was a robust predictor of growth in recruits’ individual humility two years later. Although overall epistemic culture did not directly predict democratic attitudes, we found a significant indirect pathway: a more positive perceived culture predicted higher subsequent epistemic virtue, which in turn predicted greater support for democratic values such as diversity, minority rights, and institutional accountability. Unexpectedly, steeper declines in perceived culture between Waves 1 and 2 predicted more positive virtue development thereafter, a pattern we discuss as ‘critical disenchantment’, though a comparative assessment dynamic may partly contribute. These results support an interactionist account of organisational virtue linking institutional scaffolding and individual agency in virtue development, with implications for the epistemic design of training institutions.