Do Adolescents Disengaged from Morality Feel Happy? A Cross-Lagged Effect and its Longitudinal Network Analysis

Although moral disengagement is expected to reduce self-condemnation, whether adolescents’ happiness would be under the influence of moral disengagement is underexplored. This two-wave study including 776 Chinese adolescents (43.3% boys, Mage Time1 = 14.23) investigated the longitudinal relationship between adolescents’ moral disengagement and happiness. The cross-lagged panel modeling showed that, overall, moral disengagement of adolescents at Time 1 (October 2021) was related to lower levels of happiness at Time 2 (October 2022), whereas happiness at Time 1 did not predict their moral disengagement at Time 2. Further cross-lagged network analyses revealed that “misconstruing consequences” and “moral justification” were the two most influential disengagement mechanisms for reducing happiness. Yet, some relatively gentle mechanisms of moral disengagement (“euphemistic labeling,” “palliative comparison,” and “diffusion of responsibility”) as well as the extreme one(“dehumanization”) did not negatively predict happiness nodes. In addition, some nodes of happiness (e.g., “satisfied with life”) in turn negatively predicted some moral disengagement mechanisms. This study can provide practical guidance to adolescents in abandoning moral disengagement to avoid damaging future happiness. Methodologically it sheds light on how network analysis can be applied as a complementary analysis to the field of social and developmental psychology.