Self-deceptive & Rationalizing Processes

1. Minimization of one’s own aggression by comparing it with worse behavior by others.
2. Justification of one’s own aggression in terms of higher moral principles.  Perhaps the best example of this type of self-vindication and denial of responsibility is the frequent claim of nations at war that "God is on our side," and the companion notion that theirs is a righteous, holy battle.
3. Displacement of responsibility.  Here the individual avoids ownership of his or her own aggressive behavior by shifting responsibility for it to a higher authority, an authority willing to assume such responsibility.  The commonly heard plea by those on trial for war crimes that they "were just following orders" is a prime illustration of such displacement to higher-ranking others.
4. Diffusion of responsibility.  Aggression, especially on a large scale, may require for its enactment the services of many different people, each contributing his or her small part to the larger effort.  It is often possible under such circumstances to make each contribution seem and feel relatively harmless, especially if the persons involved are kept (by others or themselves) relatively ignorant of the overall aggressive effort.  The Nazi concentration camp death machine, a product composed of many individual contributions, illustrates such diffusion of responsibility clearly.
5. Dehumanization of victims.  It appears to be the case that the greater the empathy we feel for another person, the more we perceive his or her world and humanness, the less able we are to hurt him or her.  The opposite also appears to be true.  The more we are able to view someone as something less than human, or even as of another species, the more readily we will behave aggressively toward that person. Good examples of our tendency to give such persons a demeaning label or name, see the others as "them" and unlike "us" and via such dehumanizing enable ourselves to hurt them include:
• Racial or religious stereotyping
• The view of the enemy in wartime
• Our attitude toward fans of the other team at a heated sports contest
6. De-individuation.  This is a guilt-reducing, aggression-promoting phenomenon that often occurs in riots, mob or crowd violence, or other forms of group aggression. Each person, in a sense, temporarily loses his or her individual identity in becoming part of a larger collective.  Rather than a spreading out, sharing or diffusion of responsibility as we have described, de-individuation instead serves as a denial of responsibility.  The highly emotional, aggressive collective violence enacted by large groups of fans at soccer, football or other athletic matches illustrates this quality well.
7. Attribution of blame to victims.  A related but different type of denial of responsibility for one's own aggressive behavior involves holding the target of the aggression responsible.  As Professor Bandura put it, "Aggressors see themselves as essentially persons of good will who are forced into punitive actions by villainous opponents."  Victims, it is held, bring it on themselves. Not uncommonly, youths who are chronically delinquent and adults who are career criminals are adept at trying to explain away their antisocial behavior with detailed descriptions of how the victim's stupidity, resistance, hesitancy or other qualities "made me do it."
8. Graduated desensitization.  Repeated performance of unpleasant behavior, especially when taken in small steps, can progressively decrease its unpleasantness and increase its perpetrator's tolerance for and acceptance of both the behavior itself and his or her own self-perception as an individual capable of doing such things.  In this manner, the level of aggression can increase gradually, until eventually the perpetrator can carry out cruel and violent acts with little discomfort. A good illustration of such graduated desensitization is the way in which torturers are trained; they start out watching other torturers at work, then are told to join in, and finally, are instructed to carry out tortures on their own.
9. Hygienic positioning.  Here the aggressor positions himself or herself at a sufficient distance from the impact or consequences of his or her own violent behavior to enable him or her to deny the repercussions.  Sometimes this distancing is literally true as when a soldier fires a missile or large artillery piece at a distant target or a bombardier drops bombs from an altitude of many miles.

Other times, the distancing is figurative as when verbal deniers are used to describe one’s own aggressive acts. For example, the victim was “offed” or “wasted,” not “killed” or “murdered”; or, as in concentration camp terminology, “units were processed” rather than “human beings were slaughtered.” When we stop and think about it, as we seldom do, our ability to avoid taking responsibility for our own aggression is both quite remarkable and quite dismaying.