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Disengaging From Moral Disengagement: Scant Experimental Evidence For A Popular Theory, Lydia Elisabeth Eckstein Jackson

Doctoral Dissertations

Moral disengagement theory (Bandura, 1999) is a popular theory widely used to explain how people are able to commit atrocities without incurring self-condemnation. Assuming the internalization of moral standards in socialization, the theory suggests that a sufficient enticement may motivate people to disengage their moral standards so as to violate them without negative consequences for self-perception. Thereby moral disengagement theory is proposed to be distinct from cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1954) in that disengagement is assumed to happen as an antecedent to injurious behavior. This temporal assumption has been all but ignored by extant research and presents a gap in …