The contribution of moral disengagement to adolescents' use of doping substances

The present research focused on the general hypothesis that moral disengagement, which involves individuals' specific means to deactivate moral censures, may partly account for adolescents' propensity to use doping substances. It also summarised novel analyses from a comprehensive dataset involving 1,975 Italian high-school students, which firstly showed that different mechanisms of moral disengagement loaded on a single dimension and, secondly, evidenced that moral disengagement had reciprocal longitudinal relations with a series of doping-related variables, namely, positive attitudes, self-regulatory efficacy to resist social pressure for doping, social norms concerning approval for doping use, and doping intentions. Furthermore, these patterns of social-cognitive relations partly accounted for adolescents' use of doping. Thirdly, a series of analyses tested whether the relations among these variables vary with participants' sport motivational orientations. The findings of the present study emphasise the importance of moral disengagement in the complex system of psychological variables that can influence the choice of using performance-enhancing drugs.