portraying an immoral conduct as warranted (moral
justification); (ii) by contrasting a condemned act with
worse conducts (advantageous comparison); (iii) by
using language which palliates the condemned act
thus diminishing its severity (euphemistic labeling).
The second set of disengagement practices operates
by obscuring or minimizing one’s agentive role in the
harm caused (displacement and diffusion of responsibility).
The third category operates by minimizing,
disregarding or distorting the consequences of one’s action,
allowing the individual to distance him or herself
from the harm caused or to emphasize positive rather
than negative outcomes (minimizing ormisconstruing
consequences). Finally, through blaming or dehumanizing
the victim, negative feelings can be avoided by
stripping the recipients of detrimental acts of human
qualities (dehumanization) or considering aggression
as provoked by the victim (attribution of blame).
Immoral behavior is not uncommon among children.
Unfortunately, due to the paucity of longitudinal
research in this field, there is little empirical
data on how moral disengagement changes with children’s
development. In particular, as far as we know,
only two studies directly examined how moral disengagement
changes across time. Shulman et al. [2011]
recently investigated moral disengagement stability
across a 3-year follow-up period in a group of 14–17
years old juvenile male offenders. The authors found
a tendency of moral disengagement to decline over
time.
In a community sample, Paciello et al. [2008] conducted
a longitudinal study of Italian adolescents
assessed at four intervals from the ages of 14 to 20
to measure the stability and change of moral disengagement
and its relationship to aggressive behavior.
These authors identified four distinct developmental
categories as follows: (i) nondisengaged adolescents
(37.9% of the sample) who started with initially
low levels of moral disengagement followed by a significant
decline, (ii) a normative group (44.5%) that
started with initiallymoderate levels followed by a decline,
(iii) the so-called “later desistent” adolescents
(6.9%) who started with initially high-medium levels
followed by a significant increase from the ages of 14
to 16 and an even steeper decline from the ages of
16–20, and (iv) a “chronic” group (10.7%) that maintained
constant medium-high levels of moral disengagement.
Even though there are not similar longitudinal
analyses with younger children, previous studies
have shown that moral disengagement processes
are already present and measurable during the elementary
school years [e.g., Caprara et al., 1995; Pelton
et al., 2004]. Presently what is unclear is whether
the psychological meaning of these processes and the