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.