Student Scholars: Moral Disengagement Theory and Support for the Death Penalty

In this new series, the Death Penalty Information Center will occasionally highlight student work on the death penalty, including master's and doctoral theses and law journal articles.

In her 2024 thesis, master's candidate Christine Poole of the University of Alabama examines the use of moral disengagement theory to justify support for the death penalty. Using online surveys, she assessed participants' knowledge of the death penalty, their support for the death penalty, and their use of moral disengagement techniques in approaching the topic.

“Moral distancing is a preemptive cognitive process that justifies socially unacceptable behavior and reduces the guilt associated with it,” Ms. Poole explains. Her study found that many death penalty supporters distanced themselves ethically and morally from those sentenced to death, using three elements of moral distancing theory – euphemism, favorable comparison and dehumanization – to justify their views on the death penalty. “Euphemism means that language is sugarcoated to avoid the harsh realities of the crime,” she wrote, and “favorable comparison means that individuals compare their behavior to that of individuals who have committed worse crimes in order to appear more acceptable.”

For example, “death penalty” or “justice is done” is used euphemistically instead of “execution”; a favorable comparison may contrast the method of lethal injection with graphic details of crimes committed; and dehumanization is used to characterize those sentenced to death as “monsters” or “animals.” Ms. Poole found that 66.7% of death penalty supporters among study participants adopted a mechanistic tone of dehumanization (p. 31)—denying humans “warmth, agency, emotionality, and the cognitive capacity for depth” (p. 6).

Ms. Poole's methods and findings provide a new approach to understanding the formation and defense of opinions about the death penalty.