Moral disengagement and willingness to behave unethically against ex-partner in a child custody dispute

Abstract

The current study examines the role of moral disengagement on the likelihood of making false allegations or retaliating against the partner in a child custody dispute. Moral disengagement strategies can be useful to explain this tendency to harm their partner in a custody dispute, because they help reduce the aversive state caused by the dissonance provoked when the ethical principles of the individual do not match their behavior. An individual that is able to lessen the negative affect anticipated before committing a transgression, would be more likely to engage in it. A sample of 1097 Spanish adults who had experienced a break up with their partner and had children participated in the study. They were evenly divided by sex and their mean age was 39.95 (SD = 8.89). They answered to a vignette depicting a child custody dispute during a break up process and answered to a series of questions regarding whether they would be willing to make false allegations or to take retaliatory action against their former partner. They also answered to questionnaires on moral disengagement and the “dark triad” of personality. Results show that moral disengagement is a significant predictor of false allegations and retaliatory action, stronger than any of the variables included in the “dark triad”, and predicts willingness to harm the partner beyond the common core of dark traits. We did not find gender differences in inclination to harm the partner, although men are more prone to the use of moral disengagement strategies than women. Still, we found that the type of moral disengagement that better predicts these tendencies is different for men and women. Men significantly favored reconstrual strategies that include moral justification, advantageous comparison and euphemistic labelling, while the best predictor for women are strategies focused on the recipient, like attribution of blame or dehumanization.