In his theory of moral disengagement, Albert Bandura (1986) suggests that most people develop a mechanism of self-sanction in order to prevent them from conducting immoral actions that could adversely affect a person’s self-worth and cause a person’s self-perception become negative (p. 161). However, since moral standards are not constantly active, but are actually activated in specific situations, such as during decision-making, even a person, who holds firm moral beliefs, can turn to mechanisms of moral disengagement, when “conducive social conditions”, rather than “monstrous people,” are required (“How people do bad things,” 1991, p. 1). According to the theory, there are such mechanisms of moral disengagement as the moral justification of immoral actions, palliative comparison, euphemistic labeling, disregard for, and distortion of, consequences, displacement or diffusion of responsibility, dehumanization of a victim or attribution of blame to such victim (Bandura, 1986, p. 162). While Bandura offers an overview of such mechanisms in application to terrorism and counterterrorism, they are widely used in everyday life by ordinary people and can be applied in any situation when moral disengagement is required (Bandura, 1986, p. 162).
The first mechanism, moral justification, uses cognitive reconstrual in order to make the immoral action look more humane, socially acceptable and even desirable (Bandura, 1986, p. 162). After the future action is justified to the person, such action is no longer deemed immoral, and a person can act with a clean conscience by allegedly fulfilling his or her moral duty. The second mechanism involves justifying one immoral act by comparing it with another one. This way, a person contrasts an appalling act with his or her actions, often counteraction, in order to believe and make others believe that such actions are the lesser evil. For example, counterterrorist measures can be justified from a standpoint that terrorist acts bring deaths to thousands of people, while countermeasures will only kill a few people to end the injustice (Bandura, 1986, p. 171). Next, euphemistic labeling involves the usage of language that will portray the immoral act as less immoral and “benign,” while people involved in it feel less guilty and responsible euphemistic labeling (Bandura, 1986, p. 170). An example offered by Bandura tells that people are often told that soldiers waste people, instead of directly saying that they kill them (Bandura, 1986, p. 170). This way, the act of killing does not sound so inhumane and tragic. When diffusing responsibility for an immoral act, a person makes the relationship between his actions and its consequences less pronounced by dividing responsibility among several known people or even making the action collective, without any particular person taking the blame (Bandura, 1986, p. 176). The distortion or displacement of responsibility takes place when a person usually ignores either all consequences, or at least a part of them (Bandura, 1986, p. 177). In such case, a person can become very selective about the consequences and see only benefits or minor negative issues (Bandura, 1986, p. 177). The practice of dehumanization is also popular and involves deliberate blindness towards human attributes and characteristics of the victim, and the perpetrator can think of a person in the abstract, objectifying terms to make a person, an object of immoral action, rather than a human victim (Bandura, 1986, p. 181). Finally, attribution of blame means that either the perpetrator or the observer view the victim as at least partially responsible for such victim’s misfortunes (Bandura, 1986, p. 185).
This theory can be applied to individual and crowd violence by showing how various acts of such violence occur because its participants used applicable moral disengagement mechanisms, often several of them at once, to justify their immoral acts. For example, when one person verbally attacks another person, and such second person physically attacks the first one in return, such second person uses the attribution of blame to the victim to justify his or her inadequate response to the verbal attack. Similarly, crowds of fans of two sports teams can clash and justify such violence by diffusing responsibility among many participants of the fight. Bandura offers two ways of prevention of moral disengagement. The first one is through the power of humanization, when the victim of immoral act can calmly and patiently negotiate with the perpetrator, in which case the perpetrator may find it increasingly harder to commit his or her immoral act because of the weakened self-deterrents (Bandura, 1986, p. 183). Finally, the psychologist stresses that each society needs to develop strong safeguards against the abuse of justificatory power of various institutions that are often used for immoral acts (Bandura, 1986, p. 191).
References
Bandura, A. (1986). Mechanisms of moral disengagement. In Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory (pp. 161-191). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
How people do bad things: Turning off moral controls. (1991, December 3). Stanford News, 1-2.
