Institutional scandals are routinely blamed on isolated individuals despite systemic causes.

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects closely to the reader’s interest in claims about how harm is laundered through systems; same territory as Milgram, Stanford prison, and systemic-violence discussions. — 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a network of complicities, not isolated incidents — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1568
• SEED: Article angle: the ‘bad apples’ framing as a ritual of institutional purification, tracing the metaphor’s appearances from Abu Ghraib to bank scandals and police misconduct.