Question

Describe Bandura's six disengagement practices

Answer 1

• 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.
• Moral disengagement is an umbrella term in social psychology for the processes we employ to rationalise any harm that we might do to others while maintaining a positive image of ourselves as moral agents.
• 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”- the process by which individuals rationalise harm done to others in ways that make it appear morally justifiable (e.g., if I didn’t do this, someone else would, and it’s better if I’d do it because my motives are not reprehensible, ‘playing the victim’);
• Euphemistic labeling-use of morally neutral language to make reprehensible conduct seem less harmful or even benign (e.g., collateral damage is inevitable in such situations);
• Advantageous comparison-unethical behaviour is compared with even more harmful conduct, thus making the original behaviour appear acceptable (e.g., what I did was nothing compared to the other things that had been done recently);
• Displacement of responsibility- viewing one’s behaviour as being a direct result of authoritative dictates (e.g., I was only following orders)
• Disregard or distortion of consequences-downplaying the probable results of unethical behaviour (e.g., taking this little bit of money doesn’t affect anything in a huge company like this)
• Dehumanizing or demonizing the other- us-versus-them thinking based on convenient stereotypes (e.g., they live like animals, therefore they deserve to be treated like animals)