Explaining transgressions with moral disengagement strategies and their effects on trust repair

Abstract

When providing explanations for a transgression, the offender may use verbal statements based on moral disengagement strategies to mitigate the negative consequences of a trust violation. That is, the offender may try to reframe unethical acts to appear less harmful, or displace responsibility for the wrongdoing, or distort the consequences of his or her actions in order to address the repair of a damage of a trust violation. Based on this, we examined the effects of these explanations based on different moral disengagement strategies on trust repair. The results of a scenario-based experiment show that both the moral justification and the displacement of responsibility strategies elicited higher trusting intentions compared to the distortion of consequences strategy. This effect was mediated by trusting beliefs toward the offender. These findings suggest that reframing the unethical conduct as targeting a greater good, as well as obscuring personal agency for the detrimental conduct, may be more effective to repair trust than misrepresenting the consequences of the immoral acts.