Moral Disengagement as a Social Phenomenon: Effects of Moral Disengagement on Moral Judgments of Others and Shared Cognition in Groups
- ISBN-10
- 9036106397
- ISBN-13
- 9789036106399
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2021
Description
Unethical behavior in business is a serious and prevailing phenomenon. Much of this conduct is characterized by shared knowledge or coordination within a group, indicating that the social context may be relevant in the study of such unethical behavior. Advancing the understanding of the social context in which unethical behavior unfolds is a key consideration for this dissertation, which employs moral disengagement theory as its primary theoretical lens. Moral disengagement theory has established itself as a widely applied paradigm to explain unethical behavior, providing an account of how people do harm and live with themselves (Bandura, 1999, 2016). Moral disengagement theory proposes that people are able to reconstrue moral cognitions through psychological processes to the effect that they reconstrue morality, reevaluating behaviors formerly judged to be immoral as amoral, morally permissible, or even morally obligatory; or to reconstrue agency in the behavior, thereby distancing themselves from being responsible for the behavior. Most researchers so far have investigated moral disengagement exclusively as an intrapsychic phenomenon. By attempting to shed light on how people behave unethically when they are not operating in the shadows or when they do so in concert with others, this dissertation contributes particularly to the moral disengagement literature that transcends the frontier of the individual and explores moral disengagement as a social phenomenon. First, this study attempts to investigate how someone’s own morally disengaged unethical behavior affects their moral judgment of the behavior enacted by others (Research question 1). To this end, the present research takes an individual-level perspective, which involves studying people as they mentally represent other people.
