Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities

1999 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Bandura
Keyword(s):  
Moral Agency ◽  
Moral Disengagement ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Regulatory Mechanisms ◽  
Personal Agency ◽  
Personal Standards ◽  
Moral Conduct ◽  
Attribution Of Blame ◽  
The Many ◽  
And Diffusion

Moral agency is manifested in both the power to refrain from behaving inhumanely and the proactive power to behave humanely. Moral agency is embedded in a broader sociocognitive self theory encompassing self-organizing, proactive, self-reflective, and self-regulatory mechanisms rooted in personal standards linked to self-sanctions. The self-regulatory mechanisms governing moral conduct do not come into play unless they are activated, and there are many psychosocial maneuvers by which moral self-sanctions are selectively disengaged from inhumane conduct. The moral disengagement may center on the cognitive restructuring of inhumane conduct into a benign or worthy one by moral justification, sanitizing language, and advantageous comparison; disavowal of a sense of personal agency by diffusion or displacement of responsibility; disregarding or minimizing the injurious effects of one 's actions; and attribution of blame to, and dehumanization of those who are victimized. Many inhumanities operate through a supportive network of legitimate enterprises run by otherwise considerate people who contribute to destructive activities by disconnected subdivision of functions and diffusion of responsibility. Given the many mechanisms for disengaging moral control, civilized life requires, in addition to humane personal standards, safeguards built into social systems that uphold compassionate behavior and renounce cruelty.

“It’s Not My Fault; It’s Not Serious”: Athlete Accounts of Moral Disengagement in Competitive Sport

2009 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 388-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karine Corrion ◽  
Thierry Long ◽  
Alan L. Smith ◽  
Fabienne d’Arripe-Longueville
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Moral Disengagement ◽  
Female Athletes ◽  
Moral Justification ◽  
Competitive Sport ◽  
Responsibility Attribution ◽  
Semistructured Interviews ◽  
Attribution Of Blame ◽  
And Diffusion ◽  
Diffusion Of Responsibility

This study was designed to assess athletes’ use of moral disengagement in competitive sport. We conducted semistructured interviews with 24 elite male and female athletes in basketball and taekwondo. Participants described transgressive behaviors in competitive situations and reasons for adopting such behaviors. Content analyses revealed that the eight moral disengagement mechanisms identified in everyday Life (i.e., moral justification, advantageous comparison, euphemistic labeling, minimizing or ignoring consequences, attribution of blame, dehumanization, displacement of responsibility, and diffusion of responsibility; Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, & Pastorelli, 1996) were germane in sport. However, the most frequently adopted mechanisms in sport (i.e., displacement and diffusion of responsibility, attribution of blame, minimizing or ignoring consequences, and euphemistic labeling) differed somewhat from those considered most salient in everyday life (i.e., moral justification, advantageous comparison, and euphemistic labeling). Moral disengagement mechanisms linked to projecting fault onto others (“It’s not my fault”) and minimization of transgressions and their consequences (“It’s not serious”) appear to be especially prominent in sport. The findings extend the sport moral disengagement literature by showcasing athlete accounts of moral disengagement.

Innocent cheaters: a new scale measuring the moral disengagement of marital infidelity

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Lișman ◽  
ANDREI CORNELIU HOLMAN
Keyword(s):  
Psychometric Properties ◽  
Moral Disengagement ◽  
Moral Identity ◽  
Marital Relationships ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Total N ◽  
Dominant Strategies ◽  
Marital Infidelity ◽  
Attribution Of Blame ◽  
Moral Justifications

Marital infidelity is both socially perceived as immoral and very frequent. This contradiction might be explained through the process of moral disengagement, specifically by the use of certain socially shared moral justifications of infidelity, which consequently foster unfaithful behavior. This research developed and examined the Infidelity Moral Disengagement Scale (IMDS), aiming to capture the strategies of morally legitimizing infidelity used among people engaged in marital relationships. Across two studies (total N = 609 married participants) we investigated the dimensions and psychometric properties of the IMDS. Results showed that the dominant strategies of legitimizing marital infidelity are the diffusion of responsibility, the attribution of blame on the cheated partner, advantageous comparisons with other immoral acts, justifying infidelity through certain benefits, and minimizing its negative consequences. The IMDS emerged as negatively related to moral identity and strongly associated to people’s past infidelity and to their tendency to engage in unfaithful behaviors.

scholarly journals Sociocognitive Self-Regulatory Mechanisms Governing Judgments of the Acceptability and Likelihood of Sport Cheating

2010 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 595-618 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabienne d’Arripe-Longueville ◽  
Karine Corrion ◽  
Stéphanie Scoffier ◽  
Peggy Roussel ◽  
Aïna Chalabaev
Keyword(s):  
Moral Disengagement ◽  
Structural Model ◽  
The Self ◽  
Regulatory Mechanisms ◽  
Female Adolescents ◽  
Direct Effects ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
Social Efficacy

This study extends previous psychosocial literature (Bandura et al., 2001, 2003) by examining a structural model of the self-regulatory mechanisms governing the acceptability and likelihood of cheating in a sport context. Male and female adolescents (N = 804), aged 15–20 years, took part in this study. Negative affective self-regulatory efficacy influenced the acceptability and likelihood of cheating through the mediating role of moral disengagement, in females and males. Affective efficacy positively influenced prosocial behavior through moral disengagement or through resistive self-regulatory efficacy and social efficacy, in both groups. The direct effects of affective efficacy on beliefs about cheating were only evident in females. These results extend the findings of Bandura et al. (2001, 2003) to the sport context and suggest that affective and resistive self-regulatory efficacy operate in concert in governing adolescents’ moral disengagement and transgressive behaviors in sport.

Using Quantum Agent-Based Simulation to Model Social Networks

2011 ◽  
pp. 42-54
Author(s):  
C. Bisconti ◽  
A. Corallo ◽  
M. De Maggio ◽  
F. Grippa ◽  
S. Totaro
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Quantum Physics ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Many Body ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Microscopic Interactions ◽  
The Many

This research aims to apply models extracted from the many-body quantum mechanics to describe social dynamics. It is intended to draw macroscopic characteristics of organizational communities starting from the analysis of microscopic interactions with respect to the node model. In this chapter, the authors intend to give an answer to the following question: which models of the quantum physics are suitable to represent the behaviour and the evolution of business processes? The innovative aspects of the project are related to the application of models and methods of the quantum mechanics to social systems. In order to validate the proposed mathematical model, the authors intend to define an open-source platform able to model nodes and interactions within a network, to visualize the macroscopic results through a digital representation of the social networks.

The Original Partnership Societies

2019 ◽  
pp. 154-180
Author(s):  
Riane Eisler
Keyword(s):  
Human Evolution ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
The Other ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Agricultural Revolution ◽  
Cooperative Behaviors ◽  
The Many ◽  
Ancient States

Mobile foragers—also called nomadic hunter-gatherers—constitute the oldest form of human social organization, predating by far the agricultural revolution of about 10,000 years ago as well as the rise of pastoralists, tribal horticulturalists, chiefdoms, kingdoms, and ancient states. In the debates about the nature of human nature—whether we are more inclined toward war or peace, selfishness or altruism—nomadic forager societies are regularly evoked to draw inferences about human existence “in a state of nature” before the development of civilization. Studies of nomadic forager band societies suggest that humanity’s ancient orientation actually was toward partnership and peace rather than domination and war over the many millennia of human evolution. The main take-home lesson from a careful study of nomadic forager partnership societies—re-enforced by archeological studies, the recent Nordic experience, and other evidence—is that humans are capable of living in egalitarian social systems where neither sex dominates the other, where violence is minimized, and where prosocial cooperation and caring typify social life. This image is not a utopian fantasy but rather a set of potentials, if not inclinations, stemming from our evolutionary heritage. Since partnership behaviors have been essential to survival for the millions of years that humans and their ancestors foraged for a living, the study of archaeology and nomadic forager societies raises an intriguing possibility. Given the long-standing evolutionary legacy of partnership, human minds and dispositions may be especially inclined toward the empathic, caring, egalitarian, prosocial, cooperative behaviors.

scholarly journals The few and the many: A motif of Augustine’s controversy with the Manichaeans

2013 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Hoffmann
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Moral Conduct ◽  
Concept Of Truth ◽  
The Many ◽  
Major Argument ◽  
Community Meeting ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
The Catholic Church

It is one fundamental conviction of ancient philosophy that, in contrast to the vast majority, only few are able to gain knowledge of truth. This axiom, which also underlies Cicero’s Hortensius, is adapted by the young Augustine. When looking for a concept of truth that combines the ideal of a philosophical existence with Christianity, he decides to join the Manichaeans. As opposed to the ‘mainline church’ of the catholica in which ‘the many’ are gathered, the Manichaeans appear to him as a small, elitist Christian community meeting higher intellectual as well as ethical demands. This claim seems to be particularly and impressively confirmed by the ‘pauci electi’. Their approach has apparently strengthened Augustine’s belief that true, higher Christianity is to be found amongst the Manichaeans. When he later devotes himself to the catholica and leads the fight against the Manichaeans, Augustine adheres to the conviction of the ‘few wise’. Also within the catholica only few attain maximum insight and lead an appropriate life. At the same time, however, Augustine increasingly considers ‘the many’ as positive. These two aspects are combined in his epistemological concept of ‘auctoritas’: by means of their auctoritas, the few ‘wise’ within the Catholic Church are supposed to guide the many towards truth on their journey of faith and cause them to improve their moral conduct. Its big success is a major argument for the catholica, whilst the ‘paucitas’ of the Manichaeans (and all heretics) can be considered evidence of the groundlessness and absurdity of their doctrine.

scholarly journals Heavy-Traffic Limits for a Many-Server Queueing Network with Switchover

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 645-672 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guodong Pang ◽  
David D. Yao
Keyword(s):  
Load Balancing ◽  
Differential Equations ◽  
Piecewise Linear ◽  
Heavy Traffic ◽  
Queueing Network ◽  
State Dependent ◽  
Diffusion Limits ◽  
Qed Regime ◽  
The Many ◽  
And Diffusion

We study a multiclass Markovian queueing network with switchover across a set of many-server stations. New arrivals to each station follow a nonstationary Poisson process. Each job waiting in queue may, after some exponentially distributed patience time, switch over to another station or leave the network following a probabilistic and state-dependent mechanism. We analyze the performance of such networks under the many-server heavy-traffic limiting regimes, including the critically loaded quality-and-efficiency-driven (QED) regime, and the overloaded efficiency-driven (ED) regime. We also study the limits corresponding to mixing the underloaded quality-driven (QD) regime with the QED and ED regimes. We establish fluid and diffusion limits of the queue-length processes in all regimes. The fluid limits are characterized by ordinary differential equations. The diffusion limits are characterized by stochastic differential equations, with a piecewise-linear drift term and a constant (QED) or time-varying (ED) covariance matrix. We investigate the load balancing effect of switchover in the mixed regimes, demonstrating the migration of workload from overloaded stations to underloaded stations and quantifying the load balancing impact of switchover probabilities.

scholarly journals Mechanisms of Hsp90 regulation

2016 ◽  
Vol 473 (16) ◽  
pp. 2439-2452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chrisostomos Prodromou
Keyword(s):  
Heat Shock ◽  
Heat Shock Protein 90 ◽  
Regulatory Mechanisms ◽  
Heat Shock Factor 1 ◽  
Post Translational Modification ◽  
Regulatory Processes ◽  
Hsp90 Activity ◽  
Important Regulator ◽  
Client Proteins ◽  
The Many

Heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90) is a molecular chaperone that is involved in the activation of disparate client proteins. This implicates Hsp90 in diverse biological processes that require a variety of co-ordinated regulatory mechanisms to control its activity. Perhaps the most important regulator is heat shock factor 1 (HSF1), which is primarily responsible for upregulating Hsp90 by binding heat shock elements (HSEs) within Hsp90 promoters. HSF1 is itself subject to a variety of regulatory processes and can directly respond to stress. HSF1 also interacts with a variety of transcriptional factors that help integrate biological signals, which in turn regulate Hsp90 appropriately. Because of the diverse clientele of Hsp90 a whole variety of co-chaperones also regulate its activity and some are directly responsible for delivery of client protein. Consequently, co-chaperones themselves, like Hsp90, are also subject to regulatory mechanisms such as post translational modification. This review, looks at the many different levels by which Hsp90 activity is ultimately regulated.

scholarly journals Physiological Challenges to Fishes in a Warmer and Acidified Future

Physiology ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (6) ◽  
pp. 409-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Göran E. Nilsson ◽  
Sjannie Lefevre
Keyword(s):  
Global Warming ◽  
Body Temperature ◽  
Ocean Acidification ◽  
Behavioral Changes ◽  
Regulatory Mechanisms ◽  
Metabolic Rates ◽  
Ion Gradients ◽  
The Many

With the projected levels of global warming and ocean acidification, fishes have to face warmer waters with CO2 levels that are the highest in over 30 million years. The resultant rise in body temperature means that metabolic rates of fish will increase, and some may become energetically compromised. No less worrying, and maybe more surprising, is that rising CO2 concentrations appear to trigger pH regulatory mechanisms that disrupts neural ion gradients, leading to altered neurotransmitter function and maladaptive behavioral changes. We point out the many outstanding questions, including the ultimate one: Will fish be able to adapt to these challenges?

Reactions, Reflections, and Renewal

2019 ◽  
pp. 452-470
Author(s):  
Stephen Crump
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Economic Progress ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
The Common ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Changing Times ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Many

This chapter draws together the arguments, ideas, concepts, recommendations, case studies, and empirical data provided in the preceding chapters built on and around the conceptual framework set up in the first two chapters. The chapter does not attempt to replicate or repeat the many and varied points of view expressed in the detailed and informative work of the author contributions but rather to be summative, reflective, and forward-looking. This handbook has observed that modern times are hard times, changing times, where enactments in higher education have never been more crucial, nor more closely watched. The handbook also argues for critical thinking, for diversity, for social and economic progress as cornerstones of innovation and renewal, thus survival, of the vibrant but troubled ecosystem universities have become. In looking for solutions, reflecting back to when the common and public good was also a cornerstone of why universities existed, helps re-justify their elevated place in all social systems.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document