Moral disengagement mediates the link between demographics and death penalty support

Evidence

Earlier analyses identified a variety of sociodemographic factors that predict support for the death penalty. These findings are informative as a first stage of research. The appropriate analytic next stage in this area was to verify the psychosocial processes underlying the obtained correlations. The focus of this line of research tested the notion that moral disengagement is one of the mechanisms through which sociodemographic factors affect support for the death penalty (Bandura & McAlister, 2015). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1969

Categorization

• XREF: This is the mechanism link to vault claims about how social-conservative positions (Cooper, authoritarianism) are rationalized through psychological processes rather than being direct expressions of demographics. — connects to: Death-penalty support personnel become morally disengaged by repeated exposure
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1969