Sanitized media depictions of sanctioned violence weaken viewers’ moral restraints

Evidence

Media portrayals alter perceived social sanctions by the way in which the consequences of different styles of conduct are portrayed. … Televised depictions legitimize, glamorize, sanitize, and trivialize human violence. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 763

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the mechanism in Cooper’s social-conservatism argument and existing vault claims about authoritarianism — media-sanctioned violence as a pathway by which ordinary people come to endorse harmful policy.
• DEFINE: Names the four-step trivialization kernel (legitimize, glamorize, sanitize, trivialize) central to moral disengagement.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 763