Friendship and approval-seeking can override moral and legal restraint

Evidence

Others traded morality for substantial payments coupled with friendship. This was the case for Rajaratnam’s business-school classmate Rajiv Goel, who passed on corporate secrets at Intel. He described the influence of friendship on his illicit activities: “He was a good man to me. I was a good pal, a good person to him, so I gave him the information” (Lattman & Ahmed, 2011). Their social bond and Goel’s longing for approval overrode consideration of the moral and legal consequences of his unlawful behavior. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1466

Categorization

• XREF: Moral obligation displaced onto personal loyalty — parallels the vault’s claim about ordinary people rationalizing harmful policy via group identification.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1466