Phubbing and Loneliness in the Digital Age: A Daily Diary Study on the Mediating Role of Fear of Missing Out.

Adolescence is marked by cognitive and social changes that heighten risk‐taking and shape offending trajectories into adulthood (Moffitt ; Steinberg ). During this period, youths' emerging capacity for abstract reasoning and identity formation coincides with expanding social networks, making both moral cognition and peer environments central to antisocial behavior. Within this context, moral disengagement (MD) refers to the cognitive mechanisms that justify, minimize, or reframe harmful behavior (Bandura et al. ). At the social level, peer delinquency (PD) captures the extent to which youths' friends engage in antisocial behavior, creating contexts that can model, reinforce, and normalize misconduct (Dishion & Tipsord ). Although MD and PD are established risk factors for persistent offending, their joint development remains understudied (Paciello et al. ; Thornberry et al. ). Accordingly, clarifying how moral cognition and peer contexts become linked over time may reveal developmentally targeted opportunities to disrupt offending trajectories. Moral theories suggest that individuals avoid behaviors that trigger negative self‐appraisals because moral violations can evoke aversive emotions (e.g., shame, guilt; Festinger ). To circumvent these, some youth rely on MD to weaken self‐sanctions and permit norm violations (Bandura et al. ). First, they may “talk themselves into” antisocial acts through moral justifications, euphemistic language, or advantageous comparisons (e.g., “All my friends steal from that store,” “That's how it is with my friends, it's no big deal,” “I've seen my friends do worse”). They may also downplay harm or shift responsibility to peer pressure, shared decision‐making, or group expectations (e.g., “It wasn't my idea, they made me do it,” “Everyone was doing it”). If harm becomes too salient, youth may cope by blaming or dehumanizing the victim (e.g., “They deserved it for messing with my friend,” “They're not one of us”). Through these mechanisms, moral self‐regulation is temporarily disengaged, making antisocial acts feel permissible by decreasing perceived costs and increasing anticipated rewards (Decrop et al. ). Accordingly, MD has been linked to greater aggression, delinquency, and substance use through adolescence (Decrop et al. ; Gini et al. ). Longitudinally, MD tends to rise from early to mid‐adolescence, as growing perspective‐taking and abstract reasoning allow youth to reinterpret harmful behaviors, before declining into early adulthood as self‐regulation, accountability, and internalized moral standards strengthen (Paciello et al. ; Shulman et al. ). This peak aligns with Kohlberg's conventional stage, when moral judgments are shaped by social approval and conformity, increasing motivation to justify behaviors that conflict with internalized values (Kohlberg ). Neurodevelopmentally, heightened MD likely reflects underdeveloped prefrontal systems supporting cognitive control, perspective‐taking, and moral reasoning, alongside weaker integration with limbic regions involved in empathy and emotional processing (Decety & Cowell ; Galvan et al. ). As these systems mature into adulthood, moral reasoning becomes more affectively integrated and reliance on disengagement declines (Hyde et al. ; Moore et al. ). Notably, MD declines from adolescence to adulthood are associated with offending reductions among justice‐involved youth (Caprara et al. ; Shulman et al. ). However, since adolescent rule‐breaking often occurs within peer contexts, MD's developmental significance likely depends on the social environments in which the cognitive processes unfold (Dishion et al. ; Warr ).