than the rest of us to “beliefs in the moral validity of norms” (p. 26). Social learning theory proposes that we learn “orientations, rationalizations, definitions of the situation, and other attitudes that label the commission of an act as right or wrong, good or bad, desirable or undesirable, justified or unjustified” (Akers 1998, p. 78). Sutherland and Cressey’s (1974) formulation of differential association theory, precursor to Akers’s social learning theory, proposes that offenders hold “an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law” (p. 75). These theories sketch criminogenic beliefs broadly as those that legitimize lawbreaking. Anomie theories, inspired by Durkheim, are concerned with societal values that extol particular versions of success. According to Merton’s (1938) anomie (also called strain) theory, when economic success is taken to be a universal end goal but the normative means to achieving such success are not similarly emphasized, individuals who are structurally disadvantaged may turn to crime—to get what they are taught to strive for or to resist the dysfunctional system. Messner and Rosenfeld’s (1994) institutional anomie theory holds that the values of the economy, including unfettered competition and individual achievement, in the United States have come to colonize social life, weakening the erstwhile constraining effects of more communitarian and nonpecuniary logics.
Midcentury subcultural criminological theories posited that certain groups, disproportionately young, poor, and male, endorse crime and violence by embracing values such as maliciousness, hedonism, trouble, and excitement (A. Cohen 1955; Miller 1958). The subcultural theorists proposed that delinquents adopt these values after failing in the social mainstream. Matza (1964) and ethnographers such as Anderson (1999) and Bourgois (2003) provide more sophisticated formulations of the notion of group members negotiating, rather than simply holding, subcultural values. Due in part to these more complex explorations, today’s criminologists question whether any collective or individual embraces the idea that “harm” generically speaking is “good.” Critical criminologists have questioned the supposed normative consensus and prosocial bent of mainstream society, including the notion that “the values of the larger culture contain strong prescriptions for nonviolence” (Wolfgang and Ferracuti 1967, p. 301). Their critiques are both theoretical and empirical—questioning the premise of social homogeneity and highlighting evidence (even celebration) of mainstream brutality and transgression.
In general, analysts of harm concerned with belief systems ask not only what beliefs promote or inhibit harm-doing but also what keeps actors from consistently acting upon those beliefs. In the words of the psychologist Albert Bandura (1999), we need to understand “the mechanisms by which people come to live in accordance with moral standards” (p. 193) and not simply the (abstract) standards themselves. Hence a body of work on how individuals deal with the “cognitive dissonance” of doing harm while opposing it (e.g., Hinton 1996; Lieberman 2006; Maikovich 2005). That those who do harm generally espouse anti-harm moral principles and accordingly must dislocate those principles for a time was the grounding idea of Sykes and Matza’s (1957) neutralization theory. According to the theory, juvenile delinquency is a function of accounting for it in a particular way prior to acting—by deploying techniques of neutralization, namely, denial of responsibility; denial of injury; denial of the victim; condemnation of the condemners; and appeal to higher loyalties. Connecting neutralization theory to social learning theory, Sykes and Matza propose that neutralizations are learned “‘definitions of the situation’ which represent tangential or glancing blows at the dominant normative system rather than the creation of an opposing ideology; and they are extensions of patterns of thought prevalent in society rather than something created de novo” (1957, p. 669; emphasis in original). The young person subscribes to mainstream edicts against delinquent action but temporarily suspends them.
Moral principles must be suspended because we are emotionally attached to them, and we are emotionally attached to them because our identities are riding on them. The basic point, from learning theory, is that misconduct “will bring self-condemnation” and thus guilt and shame (Bandura 1999, p. 194; see also Braithwaite 1989). That violating our principles has an affective dimension means that the work we do to reconcile our behavior with our principles is affective work, which I entertain further in addressing narrative’s exceptionalism (Frank 2010b).
Sykes and Matza (1957) were not especially concerned with mass action. They had in mind individuals, not groups. The individual “feels that his behavior does not really cause any great harm” or “moves himself into the position of avenger” (p. 668) or makes some other ideational adjustment. Although subsequent research framed by neutralization theory has taken heed of mass harm (e.g., Alvarez 1997; Box 1983; S. Cohen 2001), elsewhere neutralizations have been equated with individual-level thinking errors on the part of offenders (Ellis 1973; Yochelson and Samenow 1976). In contrast, a psychology-based literature concerning moral disengagement, a concept that is comparable to neutralization, has been amply applied to mass harm and has stressed that disengagement mechanisms are culturally conditioned, with the lead contribution being that of Bandura (1999; see also Aquina, Reed, Thau, and Freeman 2007; Bandura 1990; Obermann 2011; Petitta, Probst, and Barbaranelli 2015). The means of escaping self-condemnation are not invented by individual minds because we do not reason in isolation. We get our ideas from social sources or “thought communities,” which is also the way we learn how to ideologically contravene reigning standards of conduct (Zerubavel 1997). Institutions and institutional norms and laws may set and teach standards of conduct, but they also disseminate acceptable reasons for breaches, as Box (1983) notes concerning corporate crime: “It is not difficult for corporate officials to cover themselves in ‘purity’ even when they are breaking the law because the ‘structural immorality’ of their corporate environment provides a library of verbal technique for neutralizing the moral bind of laws against corporate behaviour” (p. 54). The pool of ideas we access has been established as common sense: it has achieved hegemony. The acceptability of those ideas has public sanction and furthermore sustains status quo power positions.
Bandura (1999) proposed four types of moral disengagement that vary by the target of cognitive adjustment:
(a) the reconstrual of the conduct itself so it is not viewed as immoral,
(b) the operation of the agency of action so that the perpetrators can minimize their role in causing harm,
(c) the consequences that flow from actions, or
(d) how the victims of maltreatment are regarded by devaluing them as human beings and blaming them for what is being done to them. (p. 194)
Bandura (1999, p. 204) contends that the mechanisms of moral disengagement work in conjunction with one another, which is well demonstrated in the case of rape myths (Burt 1980; Feild 1978; Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1974). Rape myths, or neutralizations concerning sexual violence, manipulate all four of the targets just mentioned. They are “prejudicial, stereotyped, or false beliefs about rape, rape victims, and rapists” (Burt 1980, p. 217), beliefs such as: many women want to be raped, women can resist rape, some women deserve to be raped, and women often falsely accuse men of rape to get back at them. Burt documented the prevalence of adherence to rape myths and correlated such adherence with more general attitudes about gender (pro-traditional sex roles) and violence (accepting of it) with survey responses to the Rape Myth Acceptance Scale. Of a random sample of nearly six hundred adults in Minnesota surveyed in 1977, for example, more than half agreed with statements such as “In the majority of rapes, the victim is promiscuous or has a bad reputation” (Burt 1980, p. 223). Sexual violence is also promoted by the idea that it does no harm. In this regard Moran (2015) discusses the myths that support prostitution through a powerful accounting of her own experience. These include myths of the prostitute achieving happiness, sexual pleasure, and control through the work. On the question of control Moran writes: “The belief that prostitutes are in control has no basis in reality, but it has two practicable functions, related but distinct: to sanitise and excuse the economic and sexual abuse of women by men, and to obscure the core of prostitution’s true nature: the commercialisation of sexual abuse” (pp. 171–72). Prevailing ideas about some system of exploitation disguise
