Moral disengagement in sport

Before going back to (or out of) the comfort zone, I thought to have bit of review of my work in sport psychology and anti-doping. I am research associate for Dr. Ian Boardley in a WADA funded research project, and my own PhD will build on that investigating a related specific hypothesis. This summarizing bit of text is about moral disengagement in sport and doping.

The doping phenomenon is increasingly causing problems to the sporting world. The World Anti-doping Agency (WADA, 2016) issues the problems in three categories: (a) provides an unfair advantage over competitors, (b) potentially results in negative health consequences and (c) contravenes the spirit of sport. However, doping is not only existent in competitive sport despite the recent events. In today’s society also ordinary exercisers have been reported to adopt performance enhancing drugs to their exercise routine in an increasing manner, which causes problems in the future. Therefore, investigating the psychological factors facilitating doping behavior has become increasingly important.

Moral disengagement refers to a series of psychological factors that potentially contribute and influence the use of doping substances. The construct has its fundamental bases on the Social Cognitive theory of moral thought and action (Bandura, 1991). In principle, Bandura (1991) suggests that people are able violate their personal moral standards without any self-consequences by using the components of moral disengagement. There are eight factors in total that are: moral justification, euphemistic labelling, advantageous comparisons, displacement and diffusion of responsibility, distortion of consequences, dehumanization and attribute of blame. Each one affects athletes and exercisers in unique manner.

Moral justification can be attributed to team, camaraderie and honor. For example, earlier research by Boardley & Kavussanu (2007) summarized that foul play and cheating can be justified by the above mentioned means. Euphemistic labelling is about selecting the words and language used and it means to turn harmful sounding stuff to have more positive tone: anabolic androgenic steroids is negative sounding term, whereas ‘gear’ or ‘roid’ is often interpreted less negatively. In the context of foul play, aggressive behavior is often neglected by saying ‘letting some steam off’. Advantageous comparison is, in short, about making actions more trivial by comparing them to more serious examples. For example, comparing verbal abuse to physical violence is something that people have come across quite often.

Displacement of responsibility happens when athletes and exercisers view their actions as results from social pressures and not as a personal choice, which is a common way to neglect negative emotions. Where displacement happens on personal level, the diffusion of responsibility is a group action where a group together makes a decision to take steroids, and thereby the liability for the action and personal agreement with the decision becomes shared. Avoiding and minimizing harm of taken action is the essence of distortion of consequences. A practical example in sporting context is a case of injury after physical conduct in the field. A person distorting the consequences is likely to avoid finding out the status of the injured opponent.

Dehumanization refers to a process where humanity is stripped off the occasion and the opponent becomes an animalistic creature in a sense. Thus, the opponent can be treated differently without negative emotions. Finally, attribution of blame aims to victimize the one who took the action: a player treats their opponent violently or takes a drug and as a consequence attributes the decision to provocation or persuasion by the counterpart. That allows a person to become a victim of their own foolish action and thus, not (so) feel bad about it.

Overall, moral disengagement is a useful tool to understand antisocial and unacceptable behavior on and off the field. It is a widely known concept various social contexts. It provides valuable information of how people rationalize and justify their decisions. A sport specific measure has been developed (Boardley & Kavussanu, 2007) and a doping specific is under development at the moment.

References:

Bandura, A. (1991). Social cognitive theory of moral thought and action. Handbook of moral behavior and development, 1, 45-103.

Boardley, I. D., & Kavussanu, M. (2007). Development and validation of the moral disengagement in sport scale. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 29(5), 608-628.