MORAL DISENGAGEMENT AS A MARKER OF READINESS TO CORRUPT BEHAVIOR

Abstract

The general mechanism and components of the alienation of moral responsibility appear as a phenomenon that is constructed in the experience of a corrupt person and protects his self-esteem by not applying internal moral sanctions to himself in the conditions of opposing his own behavior to generally accepted moral norms. The purpose of the work is to determine the specificity of moral disengagement of police officers as a marker of readiness for corrupt behavior at various stages of professional activity. The empirical base of the study was made up of police officers who were divided into two groups: the first group included persons with 5 to 10 years of professional experience, the other group consisted of cadets – policemen in their first or second year of service. The study of variants of manifestations of moral disengagement among police officers showed that according to the scales “Displacement of responsibility” and “Dehumanization” the indicators in the first group probably exceed the indicators according to the specified scales obtained in the second group, which reflects a greater tendency of representatives of the first group to find an explanation for their behavior in social pressure exerted by persons in authority or more authoritative, which allows the subject to minimize his own initiative in committing unethical acts; a more pronounced orientation of the respondents of this group to the perception of the objects of their unethical behavior as those who have lost positive human qualities, in order to bring them out of the subjective dimension of humanity. The second group differs from the first by probably higher indicators on the “Attribution of Guilt” scale, which is evidence of a more significant tendency when the subject commits unethical acts to point to a “provocative” situation in which, due to circumstances beyond his control, he will be forced to behave in a certain way in response to the object’s “provocation” of unethical behavior. Moral disengagement acts as an important psychological construct, the application of which to the description and explanation of such a sociolegal phenomenon as corruption is productive and useful in predicting corrupt behavior.