In a fascinating article, the New York Times discusses research on moral disengagement as a coping mechanism among prison execution teams.
Common wisdom holds that people have a set standard of morality that never wavers. Yet studies of people who do unpalatable things, whether by choice, or for reasons of duty or economic necessity, find that people’s moral codes are more flexible than generally understood. To buffer themselves from their own consciences, people often adjust their moral judgments in a process some psychologists call moral disengagement, or moral distancing. In recent years, researchers have determined the psychological techniques most often used to disengage, and for the first time they have tested them in people working in perhaps the most morally challenging job short of soldiering, staffing a prison execution team.
The article cites work by Michael Osofsky, Albert Bandura and Philip Zimbardo, published last year in Law and Human Behavior. They administered a moral disengagement scale to prison guards involved in executions and those not on the execution team.
[...T]he psychologists reported that members of the execution team were far more likely than guards not on the team to agree that the inmates had lost important human qualities; to cite the danger that “they can escape and kill again;” and to consider the cost to society of caring for violent criminals.
References:
When Death Is on the Docket, the Moral Compass Wavers
New York Times, February 7, 2006 (free registration req’d).
Osofsky, M.J., Bandura, A. & Zimbardo, P.G. (2005). The Role of Moral Disengagement in the Execution Process. Law and Human Behavior 29(4), pp 371-393.
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