Moral Disengagement as a Self-Regulatory Cognitive Process of Transgressions: Psychometric Evidence of the Bandura Scale in Chilean Adolescents

Andrés Concha-Salgado (), Angélica Ramírez, Beatriz Pérez, Ricardo Pérez-Luco () and Eduardo García-Cueto
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Andrés Concha-Salgado: Department of Psychology, Universidad de La Frontera, Temuco 4811322, Chile
Angélica Ramírez: Department of Psychology, Universidad de La Frontera, Temuco 4811322, Chile
Beatriz Pérez: Department of Psychology, Universidad de La Frontera, Temuco 4811322, Chile
Ricardo Pérez-Luco: Department of Psychology, Universidad de La Frontera, Temuco 4811322, Chile
Eduardo García-Cueto: Department of Psychology, Universidad de Oviedo, 33003 Oviedo, Spain

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 19, 1-25

Abstract: Moral disengagement is a process of cognitive restructuring that allows individuals to disassociate from their internal moral standards and behave unethically without feeling distressed. It has been described as a key predictor of maladaptive behaviors (e.g., delinquency, aggression, and cyberbullying) and as a mediator between individual variables and unethical outcomes (e.g., empathy and aggression). We aimed to provide evidence of validity based on the internal structure, reliability, and correlations with other constructs of the most used instrument to measure disengagement from moral self-sanctions: Bandura’s Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement Scale (MMDS). A non-probabilistic national sample of 528 Chilean adolescents from 14 to 18 years participated in the study. The results showed that the 10-item version of the MMDS had a unidimensional structure and good internal consistency. As expected, the MMDS-10 showed positive and medium correlations with abusive, violent antisocial, and delinquent behaviors and negative and medium associations with prosocial behavior and empathy. Additionally, moral disengagement fully mediated the relationship between empathy and violent antisocial behavior, supporting the hypothesis on moral disengagement as a self-regulatory cognitive process. The results confirm previous research, and the findings are discussed in terms of their implications for reducing the use of moral disengagement strategies in adolescence.

Keywords: moral disengagement; scale; psychometric properties; violent antisocial behavior; delinquency; abusive behavior; prosocial behavior; empathy; adolescents; mediator (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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