Diffusing responsibility across many narrow roles lets each participant feel blameless.

Evidence

Putting an inmate to death requires a large cast of participants, each performing a tiny aspect of the execution process. Widely diffused collective responsibility is individually self-exonerating. Recall the San Quentin guard who participated in 126 executions but did not regard himself as an executioner because he only strapped a condemned inmate’s leg. The displacement and diffusion of agentic responsibility was prevalent among prison personnel regardless of whether they provided emotional supportive services or carried out the executions. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2044

Categorization

• XREF: The San Quentin guard’s self-exoneration parallels how ordinary citizens see themselves as not really endorsing harmful policy because each contributes only piecemeal.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2044