Witnessing in-group wrongdoing shifts accessible moral foundations toward loyalty and authority.

Evidence

Bernhard Leidner and I (Leidner & Castano, 2009) reasoned that when people detect violations of internalized moral norms committed by fellow in-group members, the accessibility of moral principles may shift; loyalty and authority, normally less accessible than harm and fairness in our society, become more accessible, and thus more likely to affect our judgment and behavior. As a consequence, the mistreatment or killing of others by our in-group is not immoral, and it may even become a moral imperative (Reicher, Haslam, & Rath, 2008). — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2125

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting mechanism: moral principles don’t just coexist, they shift accessibility in response to in-group violations, turning atrocity into moral imperative. This is the causal engine of moral disengagement.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this accessibility shift persist, or revert once the moral violation is no longer salient? What reverses it?
• SEED: Article angle: how the same psychological mechanism that lets soldiers kill also lets ordinary people defend corporate scandals, political corruption, or wrongful convictions by their own institutions.

Related

• Detected ingroup harm triggers a moral shift elevating loyalty over harm principles (similarity 0.91)
• Witnessing in-group atrocities shifts moral priorities toward loyalty (similarity 0.88)
• Loyalty and authority crowd out harm and fairness after in-group atrocities (similarity 0.85)
• Exposure to out-group misdeeds raises loyalty’s importance in moral judgment. (similarity 0.85)
• Perceived threat to the group’s moral image triggers moral disengagement strategies and ranks closing. (similarity 0.83)
• Perceived in-group moral violations trigger defensive cognitive distortions. (similarity 0.83)
• Reading about in-group atrocities suppresses concern for harm and fairness (similarity 0.83)
• Ingroup glorification, not attachment, triggers moral disengagement and reduced justice demands. (similarity 0.82)
• Glorifying one’s own group drives dehumanization of victims and lowered justice demands. (similarity 0.81)
• Moral disengagement mechanisms enable justification of in-group harm. (similarity 0.81)
• Moral disengagement from in-group wrongdoing can be countered through awareness-raising communications. (similarity 0.81)
• Glorification enables moral disengagement while attachment resists in-group wrongdoing justification. (similarity 0.81)
• Moral disengagement strategies only mediate glorification’s effect for ingroup-perpetrated violence (similarity 0.80)
• Deploying an in-group frame alone may shift moral priorities, even without moral content. (similarity 0.80)
• In-group perpetrated misdeeds ironically heighten victim dehumanization (similarity 0.80)