ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the different mechanisms of moral disengagement individually. The higher the moral disengagement and the weaker the perceived self-efficacy to resist peer pressure for transgressive activities, the heavier the involvement in antisocial conduct. Proneness to moral disengagement predicts both felony and misdemeanor assaults and thefts, regardless of age, sex, race, religious affiliation, and social class. 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; disregarding or minimizing the injurious effects of one's actions; and attribution of blame to, and dehumanization of, those who are victimized. In social cognitive theory, both sociostructural and personal determinants operate interdependently within a unified causal structure in the perpetration of inhumanities. Self-exemption from gross inhumanities by displacement of responsibility is most gruesomely revealed in socially sanctioned mass executions.
