My reesearch focuses on the main question of "how can individuals still engage in disciminatory behavior in our society?" To answer this question, I reconceptualize the relationship between prejudice and discrimination from an intergroup approach to an ethical approach Prejudice is defined as an unethical attitude leading, if expressed, to an unfair treatment of a person or a group of persons, namely discrimination. This approach offers new insights to study the prejudice-discrimination relationship by drawing on literature on ethics. Particularly, I draw on the work from Bandura (1986, 1990) on the concept of moral disengagement. Moral disengagement is an individual difference in the way individuals justify their intended unethical behaviors to render them acceptable. This concept is composed of four dimensions representing the different behavioral expressions through which moral disengagement can operate within individuals (e.g., rejection of personal responsibility).
In my research, I theorize moral disengagement as a moderator in the relationship between prejudice and discrimination such that it fosters the expression of prejudice by allowing individuals to mask the ethically questionable aspect of their discriminatory behavior through seemingly acceptable justifications. Specifically, I propose that, to be able to express their prejudice, individuals morally disengage through specific dimensions depending on the presence of justification factors (i.e., contextual and individual difference factors enhancing the expression of prejudice). I argue these factors to allow individuals to morally disengage and thus to discriminate by providing content for prejudice expression. In a first paper, I present the ethical approach of prejudice and discrimination, and present my propositions on the role of moral disengagement and justification factors in the prejudice-discrimination relationship. In a second paper, I develop a context-general and multi-dimensional measure of moral disengagement to test, in a third paper, the role of moral disengagement dimensions in the relationship between prejudice, discriminatory context, and employment discrimination.