Albert Bandura's Moral Disengagement Theory

Albert Bandura is one of the best known social psychologists in the psychology discipline. He mainly focused on the modeling of children with the study of the bobo doll, but more recently Bandura has been studying moral disengagement and this is something that has great modern implications. Bandura (1999) defines this as “disengagement of moral self-sanctions from inhumane conduct” (p.193). To put this in my own words, it would mean your inner conscience explaining what you did was right in a particular situation, but in reality, that situation could not be morally right. You could link this idea to criminals in the criminal justice system, soldiers on the battlefield, and school bullying. Whatever scenarios you look at its to note Bandura mentions, moral disengagement happens when the wrongs are done to them and over time they begin to think it's an okay behavior (Bandura, 1999). For example, an individual named Bob lives in a rough neighbor and in order to survive, Bob does some actions that are not

This can be connected to almost every social justice problem, like bullying, crimes throughout the world, civil wars, and etc… This can be tied back into how individuals commit serious immoral justices and can continue to live guilt free lives. Recently Bandura (2015) outlined some examples, one example that stood out to me was military drone operators, whose main job is to control unmanned planes throughout the world. And those who operate these types of aircraft think that they’re fighting for the right causes, but in some cases human error is involved and a great number of humanity issues arise. Bandura (1999), would say this is part of the moral justification mechanisms. Over the years the major news networks have begun talking about this subject and more recently a movie starring Ethan