Institutional scandals are reframed as isolated individual failures to deflect systemic blame.

Evidence

When institutional harmful practices go awry, the political damage is typically contained by shifting the blame to bad attributes of isolated subordinates in the social system. This is the all-too-familiar metaphoric “bad apples” vindication. The Abu Ghraib scandal provides a telling example. The Bush administration attributed the degrading abuse to “a few bad apples” acting entirely on their own. In fact, the abuses at Abu Ghraib were the product of a dangerous mix of multilevel influences operating in concert explicitly and tacitly at the individual, institutional, and social structural levels. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 603 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In response to the Boesky case, some young traders shifted the blame to isolated “bad apples.” “It’s like knowing someone with cancer. You feel it for awhile. But say to yourself, ‘Hey, it’s not me,’ and you go on” (Martz, Powell, McCormick, Thomas, & Starr, 1986). Given the excesses on Wall Street, some of the elders in the business viewed the blurring of the line between right and wrong as pervasive. As one of the elders put it, “The ‘bad apples’ speeches are crap.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1431 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Corruption scandals form a network of complicities, not isolated incidents — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1568; Bureaucrats absorb blame for system-level failures they did not decide. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1325; Stories exposing systemic corruption can inadvertently reinforce resignation to it — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1574 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Institutional scandals are routinely blamed on isolated individuals despite systemic causes. #corroborates (0.97) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 603
• The bad-apples framing deflects blame from systemic causes #corroborates (0.95)
• Perpetrators deflect systemic wrongdoing onto isolated bad apples #corroborates (0.92) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1431
• Diffusion of blame across many actors erases individual accountability for collective harm #complicates (0.78) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1556