Student Scholars: Moral Disengagement Theory and Support for Capital Punishment

In this new series, the Death Penalty Information Center will occa­sion­al­ly high­light stu­dent works on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, includ­ing master’s and PhD the­ses, and law review articles.

University of Alabama master’s degree can­di­date Christine Poole’s 2024 the­sis explores the use of moral dis­en­gage­ment the­o­ry in jus­ti­fy­ing sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Using online sur­veys, she eval­u­at­ed par­tic­i­pants’ knowl­edge of the death penal­ty, sup­port for the death penal­ty, and their use of moral dis­en­gage­ment tech­niques in approach­ing the issue. 

“Moral dis­en­gage­ment is a pre­emp­tive cog­ni­tive process that jus­ti­fies social­ly unac­cept­able behav­ior and reduces the asso­ci­at­ed guilt,” Ms. Poole explains. Her study found that many sup­port­ers of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment dis­tanced them­selves eth­i­cal­ly and moral­ly from death row pris­on­ers and used three ele­ments of moral dis­en­gage­ment the­o­ry – euphemistic label­ing, advan­ta­geous com­par­i­son, and dehu­man­iza­tion – to jus­ti­fy their views on the death penal­ty. ​“Euphemistic label­ing is when lan­guage is san­i­tized to avoid the harsh real­i­ties of the action,” she wrote, and ​“advan­ta­geous com­par­i­son is where indi­vid­u­als com­pare their behav­iors to those who have com­mit­ted worse actions to appear more acceptable.” 

For exam­ple, euphemistic label­ing might use ​“cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment” or ​“jus­tice being served” instead of ​“exe­cu­tion”; advan­ta­geous com­par­i­son might con­trast the method of lethal injec­tion with graph­ic details of crimes com­mit­ted; and dehu­man­iza­tion is used to char­ac­ter­ize death row pris­on­ers as ​‘mon­sters’ or ​‘ani­mals’. Ms. Poole found that 66.7% of sup­port­ers of the death penal­ty among the study par­tic­i­pants adopt­ed a mech­a­nis­tic tone of dehu­man­iza­tion (p.31) — deny­ing indi­vid­u­als ​“warmth, agency, emo­tion­al­i­ty, and the cog­ni­tive capac­i­ty for depth” (p.6).

Ms. Poole’s meth­ods and find­ings present a new approach to under­stand­ing how opin­ions on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment are shaped and defended.