Self-reflection is where people both face and exonerate themselves from wrongdoing
Evidence
The metacognitive capability to reflect on the nature of oneself and the adequacy of one’s thoughts and actions is the most distinctly human core property of agency. It is primarily at the level of self-reflectiveness that individuals confront moral predicaments and distance and exonerate themselves from their detrimental conduct should they choose transgressive courses of action. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 74
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The ‘distance and exonerate’ turn directly prefigures the moral disengagement mechanisms central to the whole book.
Related
- Self-reflective metacognition is where people distance themselves from wrongdoing (similarity 0.95)
- People reflect on and judge the morality of their own actions (similarity 0.85)
- Moral self-censure strength depends on how perpetrators regard their victims. (similarity 0.81)
- Criminals must preserve self-respect by sanitizing and deflecting blame for misconduct. (similarity 0.81)
- Self-contempt is the most devastating consequence of moral conflict (similarity 0.81)
- Moral disengagement is how individuals neutralize threats to the moral self (similarity 0.80)
- Keeping harm out of sight enables genuine belief in one’s innocence (similarity 0.80)
- Moral self-sanctions make people accountable for their actions (similarity 0.80)
- Moral responsibility presupposes that people have self-influence over their actions. (similarity 0.80)
- Disengaging self-sanctions requires contesting evidence of harm rather than denying the act (similarity 0.80)
- Moral-disengagement literacy plus locus-tailored strategies can curb self-exonerative practices (similarity 0.79)
- Moral disengagement re-perceives immoral acts while morality shifting reframes them as moral (similarity 0.79)
- Moral disengagement techniques can be explicitly unmasked and reversed (similarity 0.79)
- Collective moral disengagement arises from members mutually exonerating each role in a shared system (similarity 0.78)
- Self-contempt is the core psychological cost driving people to rationalize (similarity 0.78)