People transfer agency onto impersonal forms like ‘drama’ to justify their violence

Evidence

Displacement of responsibility for televised gratuitous violence includes a unique form of agentic self-exoneration. The dramatic form is construed as the agent of its violent self, as though it had a life of its own. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 850

Categorization

• XREF: Construing ‘the form’ as the agent that dictates violence is a concrete instance of the mechanism the reader is hunting: harmful action rationalized by displacing authorship onto an impersonal system — parallel to authoritarian claims that ‘the economy’ or ‘human nature’ forces harsh policy.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 850