Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement: An Analysis from Early Adolescence to Youth

Abstract

Moral disengagement is known as a set of social-cognitive mechanisms that allow individuals to justify their reprehensible and damaging for the social safety actions in order to preserve the self-image (Bandura, 1986). The goals of this study were to analyze the development of moral disengagement mechanisms from early adolescence to youth and to deepen the differences for age and sex in Italian context. The sample was formed by 1083 participants, aged between early adolescence and youth, randomly recruited from Public Junior and Senior High Schools and Psychology Degree Courses at the University of Catania (Sicily, Italy). We used the Italian version of Moral Disengagement Scale (Caprara et al., 2009) in order to explore the eight mechanisms of disengagement. Results demonstrated that early and middle-late adolescents were more likely than university students to use all the mechanisms of moral disengagement; additionally, boys were more likely than girls to adopt moral disengagement to justify their own actions. Future research could deepen the relationship between moral reasoning (Carlo, Eisenberg, & Knight, 1992) and the use of moral disengagement (Bandura et al., 2001) from adolescence to youth in Italian context.