Management and Organizations Department, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Rd. #360, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2012 Jan 1;23(1):77-85. doi: 10.1177/0956797611423546. Epub 2011 Dec 8.
People attribute minds to other individuals and make inferences about those individuals' mental states to explain and predict their behavior. Little is known, however, about whether people also attribute minds to groups and believe that collectives, companies, and corporations can think, have intentions, and make plans. Even less is known about the consequences of these attributions for both groups and group members. We investigated the attribution of mind and responsibility to groups and group members, and we demonstrated that people make a trade-off: The more a group is attributed a group mind, the less members of that group are attributed individual minds. Groups that are judged to have more group mind are also judged to be more cohesive and responsible for their collective actions. These findings have important implications for how people perceive the minds of groups and group members, and for how attributions of mind influence attributions of responsibility to groups and group members.
人们将心智归因于其他个体，并根据这些个体的心理状态进行推断，以解释和预测他们的行为。然而，人们是否也将心智归因于群体，以及是否相信集体、公司和企业能够思考、有意图和制定计划，这方面的了解甚少。对于这些归因对群体和群体成员的影响，人们了解得就更少了。我们调查了对群体和群体成员的心智和责任的归因，并证明了人们会进行权衡：一个群体被赋予越多的群体心智，该群体的成员就被赋予越少的个体心智。被认为具有更多群体心智的群体，也被认为更具凝聚力，对其集体行动更负责任。这些发现对于人们如何感知群体和群体成员的心智，以及心智归因如何影响对群体和群体成员的责任归因，具有重要意义。
