Shaping Citizenship in the Classroom: Peer Influences on Moral Disengagement, Social Goals, and a Sense of Peer Community

Abstract

General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

A short-term longitudinal study on the development of moral disengagement among schoolchildren: the role of collective moral disengagement, authoritative teaching, and student-teacher relationship quality

“…This underscores the significant influence of the peer group on the development of moral disengagement among pre-adolescents. Our finding adds to previous research by suggesting that not only do friends tend to become more similar in moral disengagement levels over time in early adolescence ( Caravita et al, 2014 ; Kim et al, 2024 ), but pre-adolescents who belong to a classroom with higher levels of collective moral disengagement are at an increased risk of developing greater individual moral disengagement.…”

“…This underscores the significant influence of the peer group on the development of moral disengagement among pre-adolescents. Our finding adds to previous research by suggesting that not only do friends tend to become more similar in moral disengagement levels over time in early adolescence (Caravita et al, 2014;Kim et al, 2024), but pre-adolescents who belong to a classroom with higher levels of collective moral disengagement are at an increased risk of developing greater individual moral disengagement. While students' moral disengagement is in itself a risk factor for peer aggression and bullying (Gini et al, 2014a;Luo and Bussey, 2023), and a predictor of later bullying perpetration (for a review see Thornberg, 2023), collective moral disengagement at the classroom level has also been shown to be associated with bullying behaviors, over and above individual moral disengagement (Bjärehed et al, 2021;Sjögren et al, 2021a).…”

“…Regarding the peer context, Fontaine et al (2014) revealed that peer rejection predicted subsequent moral disengagement, while Caravita et al (2014) found that in early adolescence (but not in late childhood), Italian students became more like their friends in terms of level of moral disengagement over time. In a recent study, Korean elementary school students were also found to become more like their friends concerning moral disengagement over time ( Kim et al, 2024 ).…”