Tag: Albert Bandura

Displacement of responsibility (Moral disengagement, part 5)

Posted on by kathiemm

The fourth mechanism of moral disengagement described by Albert Bandura is displacement or diffusion of responsibility.

Man with crossed arms, fingers pointing at others ("don't blame me")
Photo by Achim Hering (Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. From Wikimedia Commons)

Displacement of responsibility refers to claims that, for example, you are not being immoral when committing an atrocity while “just following orders.” Such claims dominated the Nuremberg Trials at the end of World War II.

Under the Nuremberg Principles, which are the basis of current international law, “only following orders” has explicitly been identified as an unacceptable defense.  Nevertheless, it continues to appear in military contexts and probably led to the reducing of Lt. William Calley’s sentence for the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.

More recently, in preparing the nation to accept his plan to invade Iraq, President George W. Bush declared: “Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination…. History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act.”

In other words, it is not our fault that we are going to war; they made us do it.

After the fall of Iraq, when informed about the rioting and looting going on, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his infamous remark, “Stuff happens,” another way of avoiding responsibility for the chaos.

It is easy to find online many quotes from U.S. leaders concerning the war in Iraq. Take a look at them and see how many examples you can find of displacement or avoidance of responsibility and the other mechanisms of moral disengagement we have been discussing.

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.

Advantageous comparison (Moral disengagement, part 4)

Posted on by kathiemm

Advantageous comparison is another form of moral disengagement described byUp and down arrows psychologist Albert Bandura. This mechanism is a way of trying to make one behavior look good by comparing it with a more frightful alternative.

For example, during the Vietnam War, massive destruction of the Vietnamese countryside by means of Agent Orange was portrayed as being a lot better for the Vietnamese people than being enslaved by the Communists.

One of the most familiar forms of advantageous comparison used to justify war and torture is “sacrificing a few to save thousands.” Undoubtedly, many people still believe that the dropping of atomic bombs on citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved thousands of American lives—an assumption with no real support.

Advantageous comparison became integral to “24,” a popular American television show. The program routinely justified the use of torture as essential to avoiding the greater disasters that could (ostensibly) hurt the innocent if torture had not been used.

The TV series was particularly popular among conservatives, many of whom apparently accepted the program’s message that not only is torture necessary to safeguard “national security” but also that it works.

This belief in the justifiability of a practice banned in international law flies in the face of warnings by experts on torture, including senior military and FBI officials.  These and other experts criticized “24” for misrepresenting the effectiveness of torture and contributing to the misbelief that torture is justifiable.

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.

Pseudo-moral justifications (Moral disengagement, part 2)

Posted on 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.