Citation

Vecina ML, Chacón JC. Violence Vict. 2016; 31(3): 510-522.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Springer Publishing)

DOI

10.1891/0886-6708.VV-D-14-00153

PMID

27075260

Abstract

This article examines the characterization of men in a court-mandated treatment for violence against their partners as holding a sacred vision of the 5 moral foundations and of their own morality. This characterization is compatible with the assumption that a sacred moral world is easily threatened by reality and that may be associated to violent defensive actions. The results from latent class analyses reveal (a) a 4-class distribution depending exclusively on the intensity with which all participants (violent and nonviolent) tend to sacralize the actions proposed in the Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale and (b) a greater prevalence of the violent participants among the classes that are more prone to sacralize. They also show that they hold an inflated moral vision of themselves: They think they are much more moral than intelligent than others who have never been charged with criminal behavior (Muhammad Ali effect).

Language: en