Moral Disengagement and Attitudes about Violence toward Animals

Abstract

Despite a growing body of evidence linking nonhuman animal cruelty to violence toward humans and increasing knowledge of the pain and suffering that animals experience at the hands of humans, research on violence toward animals is relatively sparse. This study examines public attitudes about violence against animals and the criminal justice response to such acts. The study included, as part of a statewide survey, questions of Texas residents gauging the perceived severity of numerous violent acts against nonhuman animals as well as the preferred criminal justice response. The paper presents descriptive analyses and employs OLS Regression to assess the relationship between Bandura's (1990Bandura's ( , 1999 mechanisms of moral disengagement and violence toward animals. The paper discusses implications for future research on animal cruelty and animal abuse.The study of violence against nonhuman animals largely has been ignored in the realm of criminological inquiry. Although much research has addressed animal cruelty as predictive or indicative of other violence against humans (Arluke, Levin, Luke

The humanity of what we eat: Conceptions of human uniqueness among vegetarians and omnivores

“…Future studies, implying also the implicit methods (as in Demoulin et al, 2004) could assess to what extent the effects observed in our studies might be affected by desirability norms among vegetarians, but also among omnivores. Nevertheless, even if such norms affected our results, they might prove socially shared strategies of moral disengagement among meat-eaters and, maybe also socially shared, strategies of moral inclusion among vegetarians (Opotow, 1993;Vollum et al, 2004).…”

“…Evidence for a similar active distancing comes from previous research. People who are agentic in the process of meat production seek for a strategy to distance from this sphere, both physically (Plous, 1993) and psychologically (Vollum et al, 2004). In contrast, people who refuse meat consumption by becoming vegetarians or vegans are more eager to include animals into their broad scope of justice and seize to deny animals crucial psychological characteristics.…”

“…as source of meat) would cause lesser ascription of human features to them. Cues existing in the literature seem quite contradicting: The utility of an animal was leading to its inclusion into human scope of justice (Opotow, 1993); however, other findings suggest that perception of animals' utility is unrelated to attitudes towards animal abuse and cruelty against animals (Vollum et al, 2004). The perceived utility of animals, combined with knowledge about the cruelty of animal farming, should lead to a state of dissonance that could be sufficiently reduced by excluding animals from the humanness.…”

Adaptation of Collective Moral Disengagement Scale into Turkish Culture for Adolescents

“…Moral disengagement in adults is found related to gambling [13], violent acts against animals [14], and computer crime behaviors [15]. Some researches show that the children whose moral disengagement behaviors are high in early adolescence period have high aggressive and violent behaviors and it continues till adolescence [11] and even till adulthood [16].…”

“…In Turkey, research about the collective moral disengagement has yet to be conducted when we examine the literature in the country. However, across the world, we can see many researches on moral disengagement about children [8,9,16], adolescents [9,11,21,22] and adults [13,14,15]. In studies conducted with adolescents, the relations between bullying and aggressive behaviors, and collective moral disengagement were studied.…”