In cases of corporate wrongdoing, it is difficult to assign blame across multiple agents who played different roles. We propose that people have dualist ideas of corporate hierarchies: with the boss as “the mind,” and the employee as “the body,” and the employee appears to carry out the will of the boss like the mind appears to will the body (Wegner, 2003). Consistent with this idea, three experiments showed that moral responsibility was significantly higher for the boss, unless the employee acted prior to, inconsistently with, or outside of the boss’s will. People even judge the actions of the employee as mechanistic (“like a billiard ball”) when their actions mirror the will of the boss. This suggests that the same features that tell us our minds cause our actions, also facilitate the sense that a boss has willed the behavior of an employee and is ultimately responsible for bad outcomes in the workplace.
One dilemma faced by policy makers is the choice between banning a harmful behavior and allowing the behavior to continue but with mitigated harm. This latter approach––a harm reduction strategy––is often efficacious, yet policies of this sort can be unpopular if people morally oppose the target behavior (MacCoun, 2013). This raises interesting questions for understanding how judgments of harmfulness relate to moral opposition. In four studies (N = 1,088), including one U.S. representative sample, we found that increased moral opposition to cigarette smoking, risky sex, and gun ownership, was associated with less support for e-cigarette use, pre-exposure prophylaxis, and gun safety training, respectively—with one critical exception. When news broke of “vaping sickness” in 2019, we no longer observed this relationship. Interestingly, judgments of harmfulness of both gun ownership and risky sexual behavior, though correlated with moral opposition, positively predict policy support, suggesting that it is possible to judge a behavior as harmful but otherwise acceptable, and in that case harm-reduction policy is also acceptable. Together, these results highlight the multi-faceted nature of moral opposition and its implications for real-world policy.
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