Mentovich Avital, Huq Aziz, Cerf Moran
Psychology Department, University of California, Los Angeles.
Law School, University of Chicago.
Law Hum Behav. 2016 Apr;40(2):195-210. doi: 10.1037/lhb0000163. Epub 2015 Oct 26.
The U.S. Supreme Court has increasingly expanded the scope of constitutional rights granted to corporations and other collective entities. Although this tendency receives widespread public and media attention, little empirical research examines how people ascribe rights, commonly thought to belong to natural persons, to corporations. This article explores this issue in 3 studies focusing on different rights (religious liberty, privacy, and free speech). We examined participants' willingness to grant a given right while manipulating the type of entity at stake (from small businesses, to larger corporations, to for-profit and nonprofit companies), and the identity of the right holder (from employees, to owners, to the company itself as a separate entity). We further examined the role of political ideology in perceptions of rights. Results indicated a significant decline in the degree of recognition of entities' rights (the company itself) in comparison to natural persons' rights (owners and employees). Results also demonstrated an effect of the type of entity at stake: Larger, for-profit businesses were less likely to be viewed as rights holders compared with nonprofit entities. Although both tendencies persisted across the ideological spectrum, ideological differences emerged in the relations between corporate and individual rights: these were positively related among conservatives but negatively related among liberals. Finally, we found that the desire to protect citizens (compared with businesses) underlies individuals' willingness to grant rights to companies. These findings show that people (rather than corporations) are more appropriate recipients of rights, and can explain public backlash to judicial expansions of corporate rights.
美国最高法院越来越多地扩大了赋予公司和其他集体实体的宪法权利范围。尽管这种趋势受到了公众和媒体的广泛关注，但很少有实证研究考察人们如何将通常被认为属于自然人的权利赋予公司。本文通过三项针对不同权利（宗教自由、隐私权和言论自由）的研究来探讨这个问题。我们在操纵相关实体类型（从小企业到大型公司，再到营利性和非营利性公司）以及权利持有者身份（从员工到所有者，再到作为独立实体的公司本身）的同时，考察了参与者赋予特定权利的意愿。我们还进一步研究了政治意识形态在权利认知中的作用。结果表明，与自然人权利（所有者和员工）相比，实体权利（公司本身）的认可程度显著下降。结果还显示了相关实体类型的影响：与非营利性实体相比，规模较大的营利性企业被视为权利持有者的可能性较小。尽管这两种趋势在整个意识形态范围内都存在，但在公司权利和个人权利的关系中出现了意识形态差异：在保守派中两者呈正相关，而在自由派中呈负相关。最后，我们发现保护公民（与企业相比）的愿望是个人赋予公司权利意愿的基础。这些发现表明，人（而非公司）更适合成为权利的接受者，并可以解释公众对司法扩大公司权利的强烈反对。
