Moral disengagement is deliberately trained through staged desensitization and reward

Evidence

To model gruesome killings and desensitize revulsion to them, children were shown videos and witnessed beheadings and stonings. For one training session, after viewing beheading videos, the youth practiced beheadings on three captured Syrian soldiers. As described by a child attendee who defected, “[a]fterward, the teachers ordered the students to pass around the severed heads” (Belz, 2015). Gruesome behavior was likened to an ordinary culinary practice: “It was like learning to chop an onion. You grab him by the forehead and then slowly slice across the neck” (Belz, 2015). Another execution video showed a child shooting two suspected spies in the back of the head, spraying their writhing bodies with bullets and smiling proudly while applauded as a “lion cub.” In a video of thorough dehumanization, children were shown playing with severed heads and poking fun at the decapitated bodies. There was no limit to the atrocities for which morality was suspended. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2453

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the mechanism claims in ‘On Sacrifice’ about ritualized violence being normalized and socially staged, and parallels how ordinary people are desensitized to dehumanizing policy.
• XREF: Ties to the vault’s existing claims about ordinary people rationalizing harmful policy - this shows the same disengagement taught deliberately in children.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2453