aggression – Page 3 – Engaging Peace

Identifying better alternatives (Moral engagement, part 5)

Posted on October 7, 2010May 5, 2021 by kathiemm

Sketch of Alyssa Peterson — U.S. Army Spc. Alyssa Peterson (Sketch by Margo Bendery, staff illustrator for Engaging Peace)

Today we introduce identifying better alternatives, the moral engagement counterpart to advantageous comparison.

As discussed in Monday’s post, the moral dis-engagement mechanism of advantageous comparison operates by helping people believe that whatever violence they approve will have a better outcome than not using the violence. Basically they are endorsing the common assumption that what is portrayed as the lesser of two evils is in fact moral.

Identifying better alternatives, according to psychologist Albert Bandura, takes two forms:

Acknowledging that there is never a permanent advantage to using violence in the pursuit of power, and
Recognizing that the greatest long-term advantage to the human race comes from identifying peaceful alternatives to violence.

Regarding the first form, as Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, said in a recent (June 27, 2010) Washington Post article: “Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government.”

Bacevich expressed concern over the so-called “volunteer force” created in the U.S. after the Vietnam War, and warns of the dangers of creating a force that allows the country to engage in conflicts without end: “Throughout history, circumstances such as these have bred praetorianism, warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend.”

In our view, it is also a more general sense of moral superiority that allows many Americans to tolerate the aggressions of their government.

History has many surprising examples of people who have chosen better alternatives than violence as a way to achieve security. Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela are obvious examples. People in power in various countries have realized the advantages of ending aggression–consider South Africa when it ended apartheid and Northern Ireland when both Protestant and Catholic leaders undertook peace talks.

A tragic example can be seen in the case of Spc. Alyssa Peterson, an Arabic-speaking military interrogator in Iraq who was reprimanded for showing empathy for prisoners. She ultimately chose suicide over participation in the torture of prisoners.

Our government must develop better alternatives for responding to people of conscience who resist engaging in inhumane behavior.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Pseudo-moral justifications (Moral disengagement, part 2)

Posted on September 16, 2010July 6, 2011 by kathiemm

In our August 30 post, we introduced psychologist Albert Bandura‘s mechanisms of moral disengagement. Today we begin to explore the six strategies Bandura has identified.

Bandura indicates that often people “cognitively reconstruct” an inhumane behavior to make it into something different from–that is, more moral than–what it actually is. One way to do that is to cloak the behavior “in moral wrappings.”

Bandura uses the term “moral justification” to describe this process.

When political/military leaders want their followers to go to war and kill “the enemy,” they argue that the killing is justified, even “moral.” They often claim that war has moral goals such as fighting oppression, making the world safe for democracy, spreading peace, and so forth.

In this regard, Bandura cites Voltaire, who said “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

In our view, Bandura has identified an important process manipulated by people in power. This process has been effective in getting ordinary people to kill and torture, while still viewing themselves as moral and even as followers of the Golden Rule.

On the other hand, we dislike the ambiguous use of “moral” in front of “justifications.” It suggests that the justifications are “moral” rather than “pseudo-moral.” For this kind of moral disengagement, we suggest that a better term would be “spuriously moral justifications” or “pseudo-moral justifications.”

Over the next few weeks, we will continue to explore mechanisms of both moral disengagement and moral engagement. Alternating posts between the two types of mechanisms, we hope to illustrate the spectrum of moral behaviors as they apply to engaging peace.

The next post will address the reciprocal of pseudo-moral justifications–specifically, principled moral arguments.

Dr. Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Note: This post was adapted from my previously published article in Peace Psychology (a publication of the American Psychological Association), Spring, 2009.

Moral disengagement – Introduction

Posted on August 30, 2010July 6, 2011 by kathiemm

Photo of 3 monkeys in "hear, speak, see no evil" poses — Hear, Speak, See No Evil. Toshogu Prefecture, Japan. (Unconditional permission granted by photographer, via WikiMedia Commons.)

Psychologist Albert Bandura has devoted his life to the study of human aggression and violence. It is his theoretical constructs that we begin considering today.

Bandura recognized that shame and guilt are uncomfortable emotions and that people will utilize a variety of strategies to avoid feeling them.

For some people, feelings of shame and guilt resulting from bad behavior may lead to positive character development, mature intimacy, generativity, and integrity.

Other people use strategies of “moral disengagement” to help them avoid shame or guilt while continuing to behave badly.

According to Bandura, “mechanisms of moral disengagement” can serve to satisfy their users that they are behaving morally because they are conforming to the values of their role models, spiritual guides, or political leaders.

Unfortunately, many leaders, often with the help of the media, promote the development and use of moral disengagement in order to insure their followers’ compliance in acts of horrifying violence against others. For example, they encourage viewing “the enemy” as someone evil, inferior, and deserving punishment or even elimination.

Bandura has identified several types of moral disengagement that allow ordinary people to tolerate and even contribute to behaviors like torture, rape, and murder–behaviors that violate the ethics of reciprocity, the teachings of love and brotherhood in all major religious texts, and the human rights laws endorsed by the United Nations.

These mechanisms of moral disengagement include:

“Moral” justification–which we prefer to call “spurious moral justification”
Euphemistic labeling
Advantageous comparison
Displacement of responsibility
Disregard or distortion of consequences
Dehumanizing or demonizing the other

In upcoming posts, we will explore each of these mechanisms in more detail, and give common examples of their use. We will also introduce the mechanisms of moral engagement that allow individuals to resist spurious calls to violence in the name of peace.

Be sure to check back to learn more.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Note: This post was adapted from my previously published article in Peace Psychology (a publication of the American Psychological Association), Spring, 2009.

Ecological approach to studying peace and war

Posted on August 23, 2010July 6, 2011 by kathiemm

It is unlikely that the human capacity for inhumanity can ever be adequately explained by any one theory. We believe that all behavior is multi-determined—that is, many forces at a variety of levels contribute to any one type of behavior, including aggression.

We subscribe to what has been called an ecological approach to understanding complex behaviors. This approach involves constructs reflecting different contexts that influence individuals and are in turn influenced by those individuals. That set of constructs includes: the macrosystem, the exosystem, the microsystem, and the individual.

For example, an individual’s concerns about “national security” are influenced by:

The values and mass media positions of the society at large (the macrosystem)
The views expressed in places of worship, neighborhood, and more local media (the exosystem)
Lessons promulgated within the home and family (the microsystem)

Moreover, individuals bring to all of their interactions their own genetic heritage and the results of their personal experiences, beginning in the womb. Sometimes that heritage and those experiences can lead individuals to behave in ways that change the microsystem, or the exosystem, or the macrosystem. Think of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King.

Consider also your own views on national security, on torture, on terrorism. How many influences on those views, at what levels of experience, can you identify?

In our next post, we start considering psychological theories that focus on thoughts and emotions that individuals bring to their interactions, as well as the thoughts and emotions they carry away from those interactions.

Individuals’ tendencies to incorporate ideas from the different environments in which they grow and to which they adapt can lead to a great deal of ingroup and outgroup thinking that can provide a basis for enduring conflict.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology