Fraudsters invoke advantageous comparison to see themselves as small fish amid greed

Evidence

Madoff acknowledged his wrongdoings but found relief in moral self-exonerations. He explained that he benefited others by making money for the earlier investors; only the latecomers bore costs. He tried to return funds to some individual clients when he realized that he could not extricate himself from his elaborate fraud. In advantageous comparison, he viewed himself as a small fish in a pervasive climate of greed and unlawful complicity in the financial industry: “Everyone was greedy and I just went along.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1455

Categorization

• XREF: This is a textbook instance of Bandura’s own advantageous-comparison mechanism surfacing in Madoff’s self-talk, mirroring the vault’s rationalization claims about Islamophobia supporters.
• DEFINE: Live demonstration of what ‘advantageous comparison’ means as a disengagement mechanism: recasting one’s act as trivial against worse conduct elsewhere.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1455