Where does moral disengagement collide?

In Bandura's social cognitive theory, moral disengagement is the set of mental maneuvers by which a person selectively switches off the self-censure and guilt that normally keep conduct in line with their own moral standards, so they can do harm without feeling they have betrayed their principles. Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, and Pastorelli's 1996 Mechanisms of moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency set out eight such mechanisms, including euphemistic labeling, moral justification, advantageous comparison, displacement and diffusion of responsibility, minimizing harm, and dehumanizing or blaming the victim; Bandura's 1999 review carried the account through to mass atrocities. The referent here is a within-person cognitive process, treated as a trait or state. It names the general capacity that the criminological and organizational readings each rework, and it differs from them mainly in claiming to be the underlying psychology rather than a list of excuses or a workplace predictor.[1][2]

Unit

A person's tendency to deactivate moral self-sanction, scored as a trait or state

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Self-report instruments such as the 32-item moral disengagement scale of Bandura and colleagues (1996)

Techniques of neutralization are the justifications an offender uses, often before the act, to quiet the guilt that conventional norms would otherwise produce, so they can break rules they still broadly accept. Sykes and Matza's 1957 Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency named five: denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemners, and appeal to higher loyalties. Written before Bandura and from a sociological tradition, this is the parallel construct: the same core idea of temporarily excusing oneself from a moral standard, but framed as learned rationalizations that let a young person drift into deviance rather than as a general cognitive capacity. Several of Bandura's mechanisms map almost one to one onto these techniques, which is exactly why the two names travel as near-synonyms and why treating them as unrelated, or as identical, both mislead.[3]

Unit

A rationalization deployed to excuse a particular offense

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Coded from offenders' accounts and, in later work, self-report neutralization scales

In behavioral ethics and management, moral disengagement is the same deactivation of self-sanction carried into the workplace to explain why otherwise ordinary employees commit fraud, cut corners, or go along with unethical decisions. Moore, Detert, Trevino, Baker, and Mayer's 2012 Why employees do bad things: Moral disengagement and unethical organizational behavior treated it as a stable individual difference that predicts unethical conduct at work, and validated a short 8-item measure for that setting. Here the construct is imported almost wholesale from Bandura but re-anchored to organizational outcomes and to selection and management questions. It names the same idea the psychology and criminology readings do, and the chief difference is the wrongdoing it is asked to predict and a field vocabulary that speaks of workplace ethics rather than moral agency or delinquency.[4][1]

Unit

An employee's propensity to morally disengage, scored as a trait

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

The 8-item moral disengagement scale validated for organizational settings by Moore and colleagues (2012)