Moral Disengagement in Legal Judgments

• Date: 01 December 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12163
• Published date: 01 December 2017

Moral Disengagement in Legal Judgments

Tess M. S. Neal and Robert J. Cramer*

We investigated the role of moral disengagement in a legally-relevant judgment in this

theoretically-driven empirical analysis. Moral disengagement is a social-cognitive

phenomenon through which people reason their way toward harming others, presenting a

useful framework for investigating legal judgments that often result in harming individuals

for the good of society. We tested the role of moral disengagement in forensic

psychologists’ willingness to conduct the most ethically questionable clinical task in the

criminal justice system: competence for execution evaluations. Our hypothesis that moral

disengagement would function as mediator of participants’ existing attitudes and their

judgments---a theoretical “bridge” between attitudes and judgments---was robustly

supported. Moral disengagement was key to understanding how psychologists decide to

engage in competence for execution evaluations. We describe in detail the moral

disengagement measure we used, including exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses

across two separate samples. The four-factor measure accounted for a total of 52.18 percent

of the variance in the sample of forensic psychologists, and the model adequately fit the

data in the entirely different sample of jurors in a confirmatory factor analysis. Despite the

psychometric strengths of this moral disengagement measure, we describe the pros and

cons of existing measures of moral disengagement. We outline future directions for moral

disengagement research, especially in legal contexts.

I. Introduction

Moral disengagement (Bandura, 1986, 1999, 2015) is a social-cognitive framework for

understanding an individual’s decision to act in a potentially harmful manner toward

other(s). Grounded in a broader social-cognitive understanding of the self, Bandura

argues that the cognitive disengagement of moral agency by an individual can allow one

to act in ways he or she otherwise might not. It occurs via several interrelated cognitive

*Address correspondence to Tess M. S. Neal, New College of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences—SBS, Arizona

State University, 4701 W. Thunderbird Rd., Mail Code 3051, Glendale, AZ 85306; e-mail: Tess.Neal@asu.edu.

Neal is Associate Professor of Community and Environmental Health Sciences, Old Dominion University; Cramer

is Assistant Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University.

Portions of this research utilized the data gathered as part of Tess Neal’s doctoral dissertation, which was sup-

ported by a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant from the National Science Foundation

(GR23141, Co-PI Stanley L. Brodsky). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this

article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of NSF. This research was presented at the

2016 Conference on Empirical Legal Studies at Duke Law School and portions of this work were presented at

the 2016 Annual Conference of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues in Minneapolis, MN. We

are grateful to the psychologists and jurors who participated for their time, effort, and feedback—and to Hayley

Wechsler at Sam Houston State University for her help.

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Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

Volume 14, Issue 4, 745–761, December 2017

mechanisms through which people can deactivate moral self-regulatory processes and

disengage from feelings of moral “wrongness” to arrive at a decision to engage in behav-

iors that might otherwise feel “wrong.” Humans are remarkably adept at reasoning their

way toward desired conclusions, constructing justifications through cognitive processes

designed in ways to help them do so (Kunda 1990). Moral disengagement is one such

cognitive process or pathway through which motivated reasoning may yield a desired

conclusion.

Occupational roles in the legal system often involve decisions that may result in

inflicting harm on others. A definition of harm we proffer for the study of moral disen-

gagement in the legal system is any behavior that may, either directly or indirectly, cause

physical or psychological injury, death, or deprivation of liberty to another person. For

example, police officers must make decisions about arresting people and taking them

into custody, thereby depriving them of liberty; prosecuting attorneys must use their dis-

cretion to decide whether or not to file charges and whether to seek more severe pun-

ishments; and forensic scientists and forensic mental health professionals must interpret

evidence and communicate professional decisions relevant to the case, such as whether

a particular pair of fingerprints “matched” the defendant or whether the defendant was

mentally ill at the time of the crime, decisions that contribute to triers’ verdict and sen-

tencing decisions. Furthermore, judges and jurors must make decisions that may deprive

people of liberty, place people in prison environments where they may be physically or

psychologically injured, or impose the death penalty to end someone’s life, among other

decisions. Each of these decisions may lead to harm to the suspect or defendant. Of

course, there may be compelling reasons to reach these judgments (and, in fact, there

usually are—which is the primary reason we have a legal system in the first place), which

underscores the utility of moral disengagement for understanding the process.

Various parties in the justice process hold occupational roles that require them to

make decisions and engage in behaviors that will harm others. They may experience a

variety of feelings, personal beliefs, moral objections, or attitudes related to the poten-

tial consequences of their decisions. As a result of these conflicts, people may selectively

disengage from personal moral self-sanctions so they can perform their occupational or

societal duties while simultaneously maintaining their emotional well-being (Neal &

Brodsky 2016; Osofsky et al. 2005). For people who work in the legal system, who are

often in situations in which their decisions may result in substantial potentially negative

outcomes for suspects, defendants, and offenders, moral disengagement may serve a

function to assuage guilty feelings related to potential outcomes of their societally

accepted involvement in the legal process that may lead to harm.

Despite a robust moral disengagement literature, few studies have applied this the-

ory to the context of the legal system. We conduct a novel test of moral disengagement

theory by examining its role in a new legally-relevant judgment context, as a mediator

between decisionmakers’ attitudes and their legally-relevant judgments. Specifically,

moral disengagement is examined as a mediator of forensic psychologists’ death penalty

attitudes and their willingness to participate in competence for execution evaluations.

The associations between these variables have been documented, and this project

focuses specifically on how those associations occur—the mechanism through which

746 Neal and Cramer