Introduction to the Special Issue: Moral Disengagement and Aggression in Children and Youth

Abstract

Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory of moral agency was developed in order to explain how adults with seemingly well-established moral standards can engage in inhumane and egregious behavior against others without apparent self-recrimination. Over the past decade, a growing body of research has explored the applicability of his theory in understanding aggressive behavior among children and youth, with consistent demonstration of links between aggression and one's tendency to morally disengage, justifying or rationalizing such behavior through a number of different cognitive mechanisms. Expanding on these initial studies, this article introduces a special issue of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly that includes nine empirical articles investigating the individual and situational characteristics, socialization factors, and developmental pathways that underlie the links between moral disengagement and aggression in children and youth, with a final commentary that critically evaluates the contributions of these articles and raises further questions for future research.Aggressive behavior has long been a focus of developmental research (see Dodge, Coie, & Lynam, 2006), as scholars strive to understand the factors that promote or deter such behavior in children and youth. More recently, attention has focused on a particular subcategory of youth aggressionschool bullying (e.g., Jimerson, Swearer, & Espelage, 2010)-as scholars attempt to mobilize empirical knowledge in order to inform educational practice (e.g., Swearer, Espelage, Vaillancourt, & Hymel, 2010). Within these literatures, researchers have attempted to identify the developmental trajectories, personal characteristics, risk and protective factors, contextual contributions, and mechanisms that underlie aggressive behavior. Given the harmful impact of such behavior, and consistent evidence that aggressive children and youth and those who bully others endorse more positive attitudes toward aggression (e.g., Bentley & Li, 1995; Bosworth, Espelage, & Simon, 1999; Carney & Merrell, 2001; Crick & Dodge, 1996; Olweus, 1997; Perry, Perry, & Rasmussen, 1986; Slaby & Guerra, 1988) and show lower levels of empathy (e.g., Cohen & Strayer, 1996; Endresen & Olweus, 2001 ; Espelage, Mebane, & Adams, 2004; Gini, Albiero, Benelli, & Altoe, 2007; Jolliffe & Farrington, 2011: Miller & Eisenberg, 1988), researchers have long questioned the links between aggression/bullying and morality (e.g., Berkowitz & Mueller, 1986; Caravita, Gini, & Pozzoli, 2012; Malti, Gasser, & Gutzwiller-Helfenfinger, 2010; Menesini, Nocentini, & Camodeca, 2011; Tisak, Tisak, & Goldstein, 2006). Do deficits in morality underlie aggressive and bullying behavior in children and youth?As summarized elsewhere (Hymel, Schonert-Reichl, Bonanno, Vaillancourt, & Rocke Henderson, 2010), years of research in the 1980s and 1990s focused on cognitive models of moral development and documented clear links between moral reasoning and aggression among youth offenders, with delinquent youth showing lower levels of moral reasoning than nondelinquent youth (for a review, see Stams et al., 2006). Although less is known about these links within normal populations (Arsenio & Lemerise, 2004), such deficits are not clearly demonstrated among aggressive youth in community (nondelinquent) samples (e.g., Schonert-Reichl, 1999). Moreover, these relationships, as well as children's perceptions of aggression as a moral issue, appear to vary as a function of both type of aggression and sex (e.g., Murray-Close, Crick, & Galotti, 2006).One of the more recent and promising foci in this area has come from research on the applicability of Bandura's sociocognitive theory of moral agency in adults (Bandura, 1999, 2002; Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, & Pastorelli, 1996; Bandura, Caprara, Barbaranelli, Pastorelli, & Regalia, 2001), which offers an inclusive conceptual framework within which the moral dimensions of aggression and bullying in children and adolescents can be understood (Perren & Gutzwiller-Helfenfinger, 2012; Perren, Gutzwiller-Helfenfinger, Malti, & Hymel, 2012). …