The Effects of Perpetrator's Gender, Physical Appearance, and Psychological Violence Behaviors on Psychological Violence Awareness and Moral Disengagement

Studies on violence primarily focus on domestic violence and physical violence against women. However, emotional or psychological violence seems to be overlooked. The aim of this study is to reveal whether the gender (female/male) and appearance (safe/unsafe) of the perpetrator and psychological violence behaviors (humiliation/blocking) influence psychological violence awareness and moral disengagement among university students. It was expected that unsafe appearance, male perpetrator, and humiliating psychological violence scenario would increase the awareness of psychological violence and moral disengagement. This is because the mentioned variables were expected to increase the salience and justification of violence. At first, the visual depiction of perpetrator was created through a pilot study. The presented image was electronically altered to obtain different gender and appearance conditions. Also, the vignette also had two different conditions involving humiliation or blocking. Data were collected face to face from 121 university students in 2x2x2 between-subjects experimental design. The dependent variables were psychological violence awareness and moral disengagement scores. The results showed that the main hypotheses were rejected. The gender and appearance of the perpetrator do not affect the awareness of psychological violence. However, it observed that blocking, which is a type of psychological violence, less noticeable than humiliation. The most striking result of the study was that moral disengagement was not affected significantly by any of the variables. The research findings are discussed in the light of the previous studies and social context.