Organized harm is enabled by deliberately diffuse chains of authority

Evidence

In most social systems, diffusion and displacement of responsibility figure prominently in self-exoneration for harm that is caused collectively. People do not feel personally responsible if they view their harmful actions as prescribed by authorities. The authorities themselves create mazy chains of authorization, sanction detrimental conduct surreptitiously, keep themselves intentionally uninformed, and devise insulating social arrangements that permit deniability of wrongdoing (Bandura, 1999). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1826

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Echoes Milgram’s authority experiments and Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil — organizational diffusion as moral anesthesia.
• DEEPTHINKING:

Related

• Diffuse responsibility and insulated authority permit denial of collectively caused harm (similarity 0.89)
• Group responsibility itself weakens moral control over harmful acts (similarity 0.84)
• Hierarchical distance from harm weakens moral restraint on actions (similarity 0.83)
• Large-scale harms depend on morally disengaged professionals across connected social systems. (similarity 0.81)
• Evil acts mainly arise from organizational pathologies rather than intrinsically evil individuals (similarity 0.80)
• Evildoing is learned through socialization into harmful organizations (similarity 0.80)
• Dispersed systems of many participants make moral self-exoneration nearly boundless (similarity 0.79)
• Organizations that cover up past harms commit themselves to future wrongdoing (similarity 0.79)
• Collective decision-making lets participants minimize personal responsibility for harm. (similarity 0.79)
• Diffused responsibility makes people act more cruelly than individual accountability (similarity 0.79)
• Subordinates act cruelly when authorities take responsibility for the consequences (similarity 0.79)
• Diffuse responsibility across many players enables almost limitless blame-shifting. (similarity 0.79)
• Distributed network causality blurs the agent’s link to harmful outcomes (similarity 0.79)
• Disengaging self-sanctions requires contesting evidence of harm rather than denying the act (similarity 0.78)
• Institutional evil requires a social psychology of how settings override members’ moral scruples (similarity 0.78)