Moral Disengagement and Engagement

Abstract

Moral disengagement constructs, as formulated by Albert Bandura, provide tools for understanding the tendency of many ordinary people not only to tolerate violence by their leaders but also to provide rationales endorsing the morality of the violence. According to Bandura, the major types of moral disengagement mechanism are the cognitive reconstruction of harmful behavior; misrepresentation, minimization, and/or disregard for the negative consequences of harmful behavior; removing or obscuring personal accountability for harmful behavior; and devaluing the recipient of harm. Utilizing a coding manual for identifying eight moral disengagement mechanisms as well as corresponding mechanisms of moral engagement, we analyzed qualitative responses from a sample of 475 adults living in the United States to two open-ended items addressing potential governmental rights to aggression (invasion and torture) as well as a potential individual right to protest against governmental aggression. These analyses revealed higher levels of moral disengagement in regard to a right to invasion than for rights to torture and protest as well as greater moral disengagement in regard to torture than to protest. Domestic participants (they and their parents were born in the United States) gave more morally disengaged responses to the invasion item than did international participants (they and their parents were born outside the United States). In addition, the specifi c mechanisms of moral disengagement and engagement differed in their frequency across items, across gender, between domestic and international groups, and between members of different political parties. Issues of construct validation, the interface of moral disengagement theory and just war principles, and implications for intervention are discussed.