Children deploy every moral disengagement mechanism in age-typical everyday language

Evidence

In the developmental study of moral disengagement, the various mechanisms are measured in the concrete language they take in childhood (Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, & Pastorelli, 1996). Children’s moral justifications absolve fighting and lying as a social obligation to protect their friends and to preserve the respect of their peer group or family. Advantageous comparisons absolve thefts, assaults, and property destruction by contrasting them with worse offenses in the society at large. Maltreatment is sanitized as simply teaching the victim “a lesson.” In displacing responsibility, children contend that they should not be blamed for transgressive conduct if they were pressured into it by others or by bad circumstances. In the diffusion of responsibility, they argue that a single child should not be blamed for the trouble caused by a group. In minimizing and distorting consequences, children claim that physical provocation, insults, and harassment are harmless or just a way of joking. In attribution of blame, victims are said to bring maltreatment on themselves by their witless behavior. In dehumanization, children claim that certain others must be treated harshly because they lack the usual sensitivities or deserve to be treated as subhuman. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 252

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out the full catalog of disengagement mechanisms (justification, advantageous comparison, euphemism, displacement/diffusion of responsibility, distortion of consequences, blame attribution, dehumanization) as they manifest in childhood.
• XREF: Concrete childhood examples of each mechanism could enrich the reader’s institutional-trust corpus — e.g. how blame-shifting pressures operate in the diamond trade and law-merchant settings already curated.