Digital interactivity lets audiences personally legitimize modeled aggression.

Evidence

The revolutionary advances in communication technologies in the current digital media culture have vastly diversified the sources of aggressive modeling. Through the capacity for interactivity, they have increased the power to personalize the valuation and legitimization of aggressive conduct. As the former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson has observed, the social costs of dealing heavily in violence are not only the untoward effects. An even greater casualty, he explained, is the squandered opportunities to use this powerful vehicle for human understanding and betterment. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1011

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘personalized legitimization’ through interactivity parallels the earlier point (Chapter 2, Milgrom) about institutions tailoring trust to individual contexts — here algorithms personalize moral justification.