Corporeal Corporations: People Construe Companies as Having a Mind and Body When Allocating Blame

Abstract

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.