Morality and intimate partner violence: Do men in court-mandated psychological treatment hold a sacred moral vision of the world and themselves?

Abstract

This paper examines the characterization of men in a court-mandated treatment for violence against their partners as holding a sacred vision of the five 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 1) a four-class distribution depending exclusively on the intensity with which all participants (violent and non-violent) tend to sacralize the actions proposed in the Moral Foundations Sacredness Scale and 2) 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).