Albert Bandura – Engaging Peace

Shooting down morality: a picnic for the gun industry. Part 2.

Posted on February 15, 2016February 14, 2016 by kathiemm

In our last post , focusing on Albert Bandura’s analysis of moral disengagement as a manipulative tool in the hands of the NRA leadership, we discussed how the NRA uses “moral” (i.e., pseudo-moral) justifications, euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, and diffusion of responsibility to manipulate people’s thinking about deadly weapons.

Bandura also describes the way the NRA minimizes and misrepresents the adverse effects of today’s deadly semiautomatic weapons. Charlton Heston, former NRA president, proclaimed “I want to save the Second Amendment from the nitpicking little wars of attrition, fights over alleged ‘Saturday Night Specials,’ plastic guns, cop-killer bullets and so many made-for-prime-time non-issues….”

The NRA is also skilled at attributing the blame for the growing deadliness of guns to agents other than themselves. Remember their mantra: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

Bandura suggests that the gun industry has also developed their own novel way of promoting moral disengagement regarding guns—i.e., by claiming that gun regulations are futile. After the fatal shooting in the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, the state governor argued against stricter gun controls, saying that if the shooter had been unable to buy weapons, he would have made a bomb.

There is considerable evidence that gun control legislation can reduce gun deaths. How can we morally engage people in nonviolent resistance to the NRA?

In an earlier blog, I identified mechanisms of moral engagement that are parallel to and can counteract reliance on processes of moral disengagement. Let’s consider how these mechanisms might work in response to the NRA propaganda machine.

The NRA’s pseudo-moral justifications for unlimited access to arms can be countered by the use of principled moral arguments both against reliance on deadly weapons to combat fears of harm fueled in the media but also against NRA arguments such as their claim that arming the German citizens in the 1930s would have prevented the Holocaust. (Did he never learn that the armaments of many countries were insufficient to stop the Nazi machine for several years into the war?)

Euphemistic labeling can be countered by realistic descriptive language—telling it like it is, which is essential to speaking truth to power (and corruption). Guns are not, as the NRA claims just a means of protection from violence and an assertion of independence in the face of autocratic governments; they are deadly instruments of violence that can kill oneself, one’s family, and other innocent people–and do so every day.

The reciprocal of advantageous comparison is identifying better alternatives; as Gandhi said, “an eye for an eye” leaves the whole world blind. There are better–more moral and more enduring–ways of securing the future.

Rather than diffusing and displacing responsibility, a morally engaged person is a moral agent who accepts responsibility, recognizing, for example, that refusing to stand up to the NRA endangers the safety of all Americans—in their homes, in the streets, in movie theaters, in elementary schools, on college campuses.

Rather than blaming the victims of violent crimes for not having guns to protect themselves, as the NRA does, we should recognize that those victims deserve exoneration—and shift the attribution of responsibility to those who profit obscenely from gun sales. (You know who they are.)

Finally, instead of dehumanizing and denigrating supporters of gun control, as Charlton Heston did when he called them “loony leftists,” isn’t it better both to humanize the victims of gun violence and respect those who have the courage to take on the NRA?

To learn more about the Brady campaign to end gun violence, click here.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Shooting down morality: a picnic for the gun industry. Part 1.

Posted on February 12, 2016March 11, 2021 by kathiemm

In his new book, Moral Disengagement: How people do harm and live with themselves, psychologist Albert Bandura does a masterful job of showing how, for example, the National Rifle Association (NRA) promotes moral disengagement to promote arms sales at all costs.

For example, leaders of the NRA have offered moral justifications (or at least pseudo-moral justifications) for unlimited arms sales, asserting, for example, that if the German people had been armed during the Holocaust, “we wouldn’t have had the tragedy we had there.”

NRA spokespeople also make generous use of euphemistic labeling to sanitize the activities of the gun industry—essentially equating guns with free speech, and portraying gun laws as a form of governmental gag order.

The NRA leadership also make ample use of the moral disengagement process of advantageous comparison, suggesting that if it was not immoral for people at Honeywell to make nuclear weapons components, then there certainly can’t be anything wrong with making and selling guns. Charlton Heston, former president of the NRA, invoked the Nazi persecution of Jews as a rationale for buying arms.

Another moral disengagement mechanism that Bandura identifies in the NRA arsenal is diffusion and displacement of responsibility. How could it be the fault of the gun industry, NRA proponents ask, if guns fall into the wrong hands and good people don’t have the guns they need to protect themselves from the bad guys?

In our next post, we will consider additional mechanisms of moral disengagement used by the arms industry to get people to arm to kill, and ways to combat their tactics.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Oracle, Optimist, Ostrich, or Obfuscator? Part 5. The slippery slope to moral disengagement

Posted on September 29, 2015September 29, 2015 by kathiemm

Lethal injection room at San Quentin, built in 2010
Image is in the public domain.

Moral disengagement, as discussed frequently on this blog, allows individuals to participate in or at least tolerate inhuman behaviors such as homicide and torture. Major forms of moral disengagement include misrepresenting, minimizing, or denying the consequences of one’s violence; making advantageous comparisons between one’s own violence and other forms of violence that are made to seem more frightening or odious; and displacing or diffusing responsibility for inhumane behavior—e.g., by “blaming the victim.”

Unlike members of that notorious group, the military-industrial complex, Steven Pinker does not explicitly endorse violence and other forms of inhumane behavior; as far as I know he is not encouraging the United States corporate power structure to become involved in yet another war. However, he appears to relish the details he provides on the horrors of human violence in the past and to be wearing extremely effective blinders relating to the often deadly exploitation of poorer nations by the West. Moreover, in lauding the peacefulness he attributes to the West, he uses processes identified by Albert Bandura as forms of moral disengagement.

Consider, for example, his assertion that “daily existence is very different if you always have to worry about being abducted, raped or killed”—a state of anxiety that he views as gone from today’s enlightened democratic societies. Is he right or is he minimizing the dangers facing many immigrants and people of color in the nation in which he has become a highly paid celebrity?

And how about his claim that “by standards of the mass atrocities in human history, the lethal injection of a murderer in Texas, or an occasional hate crime in which a member of an ethnic minority group is intimidated by hooligans is pretty mild stuff”? Does that assertion smack of both minimization and advantageous comparison?

Also, in discussing the aberrant period of increased violence in the 1960s and 1970s, which he views as hitting the African American community particularly hard, Pinker suggests, “widespread fatherlessness can lead to violence” because “all those young men who aren’t bringing up their children are hanging out with one another competing for dominance instead.” Can we see an element of displacement of responsibility here?

What do you think?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

The road less taken

Posted on May 26, 2014May 29, 2014 by kathiemm

First woman congress member protests increase in nation's armed forces. — First woman congress member protests increase in nation’s armed forces.
Photo by Harris & Ewing.

Albert Bandura, an ardent anti-violence advocate, comments that some people “invest their sense of self-worth so strongly in humane convictions and social obligations that they act against what they regard as unjust or immoral even though their actions may incur heavy personal costs.” He uses the term “proactive moral agency” to describe such people. We use the term “moral engagement.”

Today, Memorial Day 2014, we memorialize a classic American example of proactive moral agency—a morally-engaged woman who spoke out against war when it was unpopular and even dangerous to do so.

Jeanette Rankin (1880-1973) was a lifelong pacifist and the first woman elected to the US Congress. She had the company of 49 other members of Congress when she exercised her humane convictions and social obligations by voting against US entry into World War I; the costs incurred included losing her seat in the House of Representatives.

In 1939, Jeanette ran again for Congress on a platform advocating American neutrality regarding the widening ravages of war in Europe. Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, she was the only Congressperson to vote against entry into World War II. Among the costs she incurred for once again voting her conscience was the necessity to flee from an angry mob, hide in a phone booth, and call the Congressional police to come rescue her. Despite such close encounters of a threatening kind, she was not deterred from voicing her opposition to the Korean and Vietnam wars.

We do well to remember her messages: “Small use it will be to save democracy for the race if we cannot save the race for democracy” and “There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense.”

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology