Accepting personal responsibility toward humanized victims suppresses punitive and exonerative behavior

Evidence

In contrast, the personalization of responsibility and the humanization of others together have a powerful self-restraining effect. The power holders in the study differed markedly in their self-evaluative reactions to their punitive role, depending on how conducive the environmental conditions were to disengaging moral self-sanctions. Those power holders who assumed personal responsibility for their actions with humanized individuals rarely expressed self-exonerative justifications and uniformly disavowed punitive behavior. In contrast, when individuals were divested of humanness and punished collectively, the power holders voiced exonerative justifications for punitive behavior and were disinclined to condemn its use. This was especially the case when punitive sanctions were dysfunctionally applied in increasing intensities that impaired rather than improved the victim’s performance. Self-exonerators behaved more harshly than did self-disapprovers of punitive actions. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 596

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the vault’s existing mechanism claims about how ordinary people rationalize supporting harmful policy — personal responsibility combined with victim humanization is the restraint-side of the same disengagement mechanism that Cooper’s social-conservatism and authoritarianism claims describe. — connects to: Victims need empowerment while perpetrators need moral acceptance for reconciliation — Johanna Ray Vollhardt and Michelle Sinayobye Twali, Emotion-Based Reconciliation Requires…, 37
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 596