"It's Okay, Everyone Else Is Doing It": Moral Disengagement and Peer Delinquency

Adolescence is a developmental period during which moral cognition and peer environments change in ways that shape trajectories of antisocial behavior into adulthood. Although moral disengagement (MD) and peer delinquency (PD) are established risk factors for persistent offending, they are typically studied in isolation. The present study investigates the joint development of MD and PD across adolescence and early adulthood, and tests whether changes in one process forecast subsequent changes in the other.

Self-reported survey data of MD and PD from 1,354 U.S. justice-involved youth (86.41% male; baseline Mage = 16.04; 41.5% Black, 33.5% Hispanic, 20.2% White, 4.8% Other) in the Pathways to Desistance study were analyzed using an autoregressive latent trajectory framework across 11 waves that spanned 7 years from 2000 to 2010.

MD and PD exhibited coordinated long-term declines with aligned slowing over time, such that higher levels in either process were linked to more persistent elevations in the other. At the within-person level, autoregressive continuity varied across development, with stronger short-term persistence during the middle waves and attenuation at earlier and later stages. Similarly, cross-lagged associations were small and wave-specific, emerging only at selected transitions rather than reflecting consistent reciprocal prediction across waves.

Together, these findings demonstrate that moral cognition and peer contexts are dynamically linked across adolescence and adulthood, highlighting the potential value of considering both processes in future work aimed at understanding persistent antisocial trajectories.