The bad apples excuse fails when senior leaders presided over the wrongdoing

Evidence

The misleading mea culpa conveys the impression that a few rogue lower-ranking officials operating under faulty radar autonomously changed the APA code of ethics. The undetected “bad apples” exoneration was implausible because senior staff members and leaders presided over the ethics revision and its expedited adoption as official policy. Collective willful blindness weakens or eliminates moral restraints over detrimental practices. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2384

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the vault’s authoritarianism claims: systemic willful blindness, not a few deviants, enables complicity with harmful policy. Also corroborates Cooper’s argument about ideological capture of institutions.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘bad apples’ blame-shifting as a rhetorical device that structurally protects institutions by localizing fault, applied across Abu Ghraib, church abuse scandals, and corporate malfeasance.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2384