Strategies of Moral Disengagement
Albert Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement describes the different strategies people use to justify behaviors deemed as bad/wrong such as violence. One strategy of moral disengagement is the displacement of responsibility, exhibited in the acclaimed and often-cited Milgram experiment from 1961.
The subject of the experiment plays the role of the teacher in a false memory experiment they believe to be real. The experimenter plays the authoritative role. The false subject is administered shocks for every wrong answer, and the shocks increase in voltage as they get more answers wrong.
At higher voltages, the acting subject cries out and protests the shocks. Many of the real subjects turned back to the experimenter, who urges them to continue, as the shock voltages increase to dangerous and lethal.
Some of the subjects tried to argue with the scientist but still continued after he commanded them to, seeming to reason that whatever happened in this experiment was not their responsibility.
In the first publication of the experiment, Milgram reported 100% of the subjects administered shocks marked as “Danger” on the board. 65% of the subjects administered lethal shocks to the learner. The total compliance of the subjects to engage in violent behavior is an example of moral disengagement, the subjects rationalized violence on another person because they were being commanded to and it would be wrong to disobey the will of the authority.
Situational morals are also influential in behavior. The Stanford Prison Experiment is an experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo where the subjects acted as either guards or prisoners, mimicking the conditions of a regular prison. The prisoners were commanded to follow every prison rule or be subject to public humiliation and berating by the guards.
Despite there being no actual consequences to not playing into their assigned roles, every participant embraced every aspect of the experiment — the guards became sadistic toward the prisoners, who became submissive and fearful of them. This is an example of perceived authority dictating behavior and is also an illustration of the power of situations in directing a person’s sense of morality. Guards were aggressive to the inmates because they did not see it as wrong, they believed that the situation called for it. The three elements that dictate a person’s behavior are their: disposition, situation, and the (political, economic, and legal) system of power. In his experiment, Zimbardo chose people he determined to be of a good moral disposition, and he put them in a violent and emotionally taxing situation that completely changed their sense of morality. Zimbardo illustrated the point that even good people will commit acts of cruelty under the right circumstances.
Jane Elliot conducted an experiment to simulate the effects of modern-day racism and in-group out-group bias. She divided her class of third-graders into two groups: blue-eyed and brown-eyed children. She intentionally treated the brown-eyed children badly: she talked down to them, punished them, and she treated the blue-eyed children very well: she gave them special privileges, earlier lunches, and longer recess. She told the blue-eyed children that they were better than the brown-eyed children. The brown-eyed children were outraged at their mistreatment, and the blue-eyed children became smug and condescending, truly seeming to believe that they were better than the brown-eyed children.
The next day she switched the roles: she treated the brown-eyed children very well, and she put down the blue-eyed children. While they were not as hostile as the blue-eyed children had been, the brown-eyed children were mean to the blue-eyed children, now believing that they were better than the blue-eyed children since Jane had declared that the higher rate of melanin in their eyes made them smarter than blue-eyed people.
This experiment has been repeated with similar results. It is an accurate demonstration of the effects of prejudice and discrimination in shaping people’s behaviors. Strategies of moral disengagement embodied in Jane’s experiment include moral justification and dehumanization. Children are highly amenable, and simply being told that one group was better than the other was enough for them to justify being cruel to each other. Moreover, they dehumanized each other by regarding eye color to be the only real distinguishing factor, the only factor that differentiated “good” and “bad”. On a larger scale, these strategies of moral disengagement are used to justify systematic racism, hate crime, and more by-products of prejudice. If in only one day, children will become mean and derogatory toward a targeted group, a society built on centuries of racism and oppression of people of color encourages outright violence and hostility from white people toward people of color. Jane shows that simply being told that they are better than another group because of one biological difference, a group will believe it is their birthright and willingly participate in or ignore the oppression of the other group. Moral disengagement plays a critical role in prejudice.