hello and welcome to this short video my name is Fabian little I am a postgraduate researcher and PhD students at the University of Southampton um after a 20-year career in various roles in HR I am now starting to move into Academia with a particular interest in moral reasoning at work um so what people think about when they think about what's right what's wrong in their behavior at work how they make sense of it and how they act upon it and to that effect today I wanted to talk to you in the next few minutes about moral disengagement uh moral disengagement or how Albert bandura who developed the theory and the model uh put into how people do harm and live with themselves um now we'll come on to what that means exactly but you might wonder why uh there are pictures of cigarettes and a researcher or scientist on this this first first slide now I'd like you to think back a few decades ago when um tobacco development was probably at its peak and think about people researching and developing the tobacco products at the time within the industry and with the knowledge that was already there at the time that these products were creating harm for People's Health and think about how people then made sense of this those who were working in those positions of researching developing and promoting and and how those doing this with that knowledge of health impacts made sense of it and and managed to live with themselves effectively while performing in this role so that's what moral disengagement is about is the mechanisms that allow people to do that so it was first developed by Albert bandura who was a professor of psychology in Stanford University and dedicated a lot of his work on the social cognitive theory which really looks at how social dynamics social cues come into people's cognitive processes and drive really their behavior and their actions um and within this bandura focused on the moral agency and on the mechanisms of self-regulation which enable people to um to to to to to you know be at peace with themselves so to speak get a sense of satisfaction and self-worth and part of these mechanisms of self-regulation from a moral perspective are a series of safeguards so to speak moral red lines in a in a way which people normally wouldn't cross and um what moral disengagement does is looking to disengage with those moral safeguards you know in order to enable somebody to have a detrimental Behavior to perform a certain action but still feel happy enough with themselves feel able to to cope get on and feel that they are doing the um doing the right thing now the early applications in the literature uh and examples provided by bandura were around the perpetration of inhumanities um so for example the moral justification that came to make it possible for people uh in in war to conduct violence um military activities in this case it would be justified by the protection of the nation for example of national national interests a greater good so to speak um but also in terms of um displacement of responsibility if you look at the example of the second world war and uh Nazi commanders who would argue that they are just following orders and that therefore them having a very detrimental behavior is not of their own making and that's how they make sense and continue to um carry on with it the table on the right on the screen here shows the different mechanisms of um more of this engagement per bandura which we'll just look at now in a bit more detail um especially on this chart um which was taken out of a later article but um which is very much what bandura was working with from the very beginning of the the model and that focus on three areas within the model and um with the um the the mechanisms of moral disengagement attached to them so the first one is about the practices themselves that detrimental Behavior those actions um which create harm and they are mechanisms directly related to those first of all justification like I mentioned in a moment ago so for example considering that what you're doing serves a greater purpose a greater a greater good and therefore justifies an action which you know might be causing harm secondly exonerative comparison um so comparing what you're doing to something that is even worse to make it actually actually feel acceptable I'll share an example of that in a moment and euphemistic labeling so this is about what you call what you're doing what you call certain things and you just using certain words for certain actions or items um which kind of mask that negative effect or that negative impact that they might have and that all allows people to keep carrying on with those practices the second focus is around the effects themselves and that mechanism is around minimizing ignoring or misconstruing the consequences of what you're doing so um really making it sound as as though the the consequences are aren't quite as bad as they seem to be um so that again you allow yourself to to carry on now in between the practices and the effects uh there's another couple of mechanisms there at the at the bottom of the chart looking at um the responsibility in itself of carrying out those practices and creating those effects um through one of these mechanisms is through displacement the other through diffusion of responsibility displacements of responsibility is basically the example I provided about following orders is somebody else is making those decisions it is not my decision and therefore I can't be held responsible and I'm happy enough to continue to perform this diffusion of responsibility is more around the fact that while it's not just me there's a group of us making a decision of acting in a certain way and therefore I can't be held responsible and others are comfortable enough therefore I am comfortable enough to continue with it and finally the third area the third Focus there is on the victim themselves and those two mechanisms around dehumanization for example again looking at really the worst examples and atrocities looking at genocide uh the Holocaust for example um where the narrative and propaganda was really looking to dehumanize the victims there which was contributing to you know and enabling people to to Really to perform those atrocities um and finally the attribution of blame blaming the victim for what is happening to to them and I'll share an example in a in a second as well so that provides a view of those different mechanisms that bandura developed in the um in the model um and what they are relating to how they are being um deployed effectively and next here I wanted to look at at it in the corporate world because there's been some work further along um by white Italian bandura was involved in this piece of work as well which was looking to apply uh those mechanisms of moral disengagement in the corporate world and what they did was to look at four different Industries uh which were generating harm in one word or another and looked through a lot of a corporate um communication especially relating to research and how to identify whether moral disengagement was deployed with these and the examples I've got on the screen here are related to the tobacco industry which again relates back to what I had on that first slide uh the uh This research this paper looks at the different mechanisms of moral disengagement in the context of um the tobacco industry uh probably again looking back a little while ago as to when the products were more you know developed and when the the the awareness of the um the impact of of smoking was really uh growing and was really there so the first mechanism that I just wanted to use as an example was euphemistic labeling so calling something um using a different name uh that that really mitigates or minimizes the negative impact um and what the article shares here is with regards to addictive properties of nicotine in research documents or they could production that were shared by the industry and we're looking we're looking now in a good few decades ago the addiction or adjective wasn't used as a term and was uh instead referenced as pharmacological satisfaction similarly there was already some some knowledge about uh the the threat of cancer through smoking but references to carcinogen properties of smoking weren't called out that way rather they were called specific biological activity so again this really minimizes uh through different language that that they kind of harm and negative impacts of um of this activity the second one is around advantages comparison so again this is about finding something to compare what you're doing that is even that is worse so that you know you kind of minimize the impact of what you're doing and uh in the example of tobacco there were challenges with the impact of second-hand smoke um and um within the industry research was commissioned to assess the impact of other environmental agents such as pollution or you know other types of um of Agents out there which people are exposed to and the uh the ambition here was to find results of other things other than second-hand smoke which were more uh harmful to people to be able to actually defend secondhand smokers and and and minimize its impact by saying well actually people are exposed to other things which are more harmful to them and final example is attribution of blame and this is a quote from from the paper from one of the reports um which was saying that the choice of number of cigarettes smoked rests with the consumer and we don't directly influence this decision in either direction now this is really um saying that the industry is developing the products but the industry isn't making the consumer use them or consume them in the way that they do and therefore any excess in use that is you know triggering damage is down to the user it is down to the user uh to to to effectively control themselves um so again that allows people to to to take a step back a little bit people who are in the industry and and defend to themselves as well what they are doing it is similar there's all the research on the um the arms um industry where people are are saying what effectively we are um manufacturing uh weapons um but we're not the ones pulling the trigger and that's how they make sense of it and manage to make it work for themselves so to finish I just wanted to uh really have a quick look at the stage of the current research and some of the limitations of that model of moral disengagement as well now since bandura developed it there's been a lot of extra research research that has been conducted um a lot of it's focusing on antecedents and outcomes of Moral Moral disengagement so what is the cause of it what gets people to use those mechanisms and what does it then um trigger um obviously we've talked about some of those consequences just um um you know just now but at an at an organizational level it's really important to to understand um how you know this could drive unethical Behavior but basically uh Drive excessive um excessive risks and potentially through this research measures have been developed to assess moral disengagement uh typically in quantitative studies that's kind of one of the limitations certainly from my perspective is that most research adopts quantitative approaches um so look to apply measures you know as part of set models now what that risks is to ignore some of the complexity the contextual factors um and also the dynamisms of um uh the the phenomena that are related to moral disengagement um again where there's a lot of complexity and plenty of things at play and the focus on quantitative measures might miss some of that um the level of inquiry as well under Royal disengagement needs to be looked at uh so that's looking at either individual Collective and organizational um areas and how actually more disengagement is applied by an individual themselves or how that is reflected within an entire organization because obviously the Dynamics that will go around this and the the consequences May well be different and one thing I'm particularly interested as well is the fact that in the research so far there's been a lot of look at individuals especially people in the Forefront of uh pausing harm within organization as well people really responsible for making those decisions um but I would argue that somebody who is within the organization Who belongs to the to to an industry may also um kind of experience and possibly suffer from some more challenges and therefore do they use used to a certain degree there's more disengagement mechanisms for themselves and finally it's important to also acknowledge that more disengagement is one aspect of moral reasoning there's a much wider research and more reasoning in various ways of of looking at it and therefore it really should be considered against it when looking at a particular phenomena or phenomenon or an area um specifically so that's it it's just a short presentation on um moral disengagement and the work of bandura here that the the references if you just want to pause and have a have a look um to look back at those papers and um I thank you very much for your time for listening to this presentation I hope you found it interesting don't hesitate to get in touch with me you can um get in touch directly via my own website and enter your email address as well so that you get notified of future posts and and of my blog going forward and also you can connect with me on uh LinkedIn so thank you very much once again and take care