The Relationship Between Moral Disengagement, Schadenfreude, and the Dark Tetrad
Date
2-13-2024
Faculty Mentor
Heidi Dempsey, Psychology
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Submission Type
Conference Proceeding
Location
10:45-10:55am | Houston Cole Library, 11th Floor
Description
Moral disengagement happens when normal people circumvent their own moral standards by alleviating themselves of responsibility for harmful behavior or by psychologically removing the moral component from behavior (Bandura, 2016). Schadenfreude goes a step further by finding pleasure in other peoples’ misfortunes, especially when they are perceived to have deserved the misfortune (Greenier, 2018). A step further still are the dark personality traits of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and especially psychopathy and sadism, in which people find pleasure in others’ both deserved and undeserved pain and suffering (Anderson & Marcus, 2019). In the current study we examined the correlation between moral disengagement, schadenfreude, and the dark tetrad personality traits. Over 150 college students filled out a variety of questionnaires, including The Propensity to Morally Disengage Scale (Moore et al., 2012), which consists of 8 items designed to assess concepts related to moral disengagement such as moral justification, advantageous comparison, displacement of responsibility, etc. Schadenfreude scenarios were created by our research group for use in this study, but were based on those created by Johnson (2021). These consist of short scenarios where someone receives something they deserve (e.g., a mean manager who gets embarrassed in front of his boss) and participants are asked to rate how happy/amused they are by the situation. These take place in the workplace, academics, and the social domain. Finally, the dark tetrad traits were assessed using the SD- 4 (Paulhus et al., 2021). We hypothesize that all of these scales will be moderately to strongly correlated with one another.
Keywords
student research, psychology
Rights
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Disciplines
Psychology
Recommended Citation
Sheffield, Richard; Powell, Rachel; Helms, Haley; Robles, Katherine; and Forehand, Kayleigh, "The Relationship Between Moral Disengagement, Schadenfreude, and the Dark Tetrad" (2024). JSU Student Symposium 2024. 56.
https://digitalcommons.jsu.edu/ce_jsustudentsymp_2024/56