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 e...