Jago Arthur S, Laurin Kristin
Department of Organizational Behavior, Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia.
J Exp Psychol Appl. 2017 Mar;23(1):100-113. doi: 10.1037/xap0000106. Epub 2017 Jan 2.
Modern conceptions of corporate personhood have spurred considerable debate about the rights that society should afford business organizations. Across eight experiments, we compare lay perceptions of how corporations and people use rights, and also explore the consequences of these judgments. We find that people believe corporations, compared to humans, are similarly likely to use rights in protective ways that prevent harm but more likely to use rights in nonprotective ways that appear independent from-or even create-harm (Experiments 1a through 1c and Experiment 2). Because of these beliefs, people support corporate rights to a lesser extent than human rights (Experiment 3). However, people are more supportive of specific corporate rights when we framed them as serving protective functions (Experiment 4). Also as a result of these beliefs, people attribute greater ethical responsibility to corporations, but not to humans, that gain access to rights (Experiments 5a and 5b). Despite their equitability in many domains, people believe corporations and humans use rights in different ways, ultimately producing different reactions to their behaviors as well as asymmetric moral evaluations. (PsycINFO Database Record
现代公司法人概念引发了关于社会应赋予商业组织何种权利的广泛争论。通过八项实验，我们比较了外行对公司和个人如何使用权利的看法，并探讨了这些判断的后果。我们发现，人们认为，与人类相比，公司同样有可能以防止伤害的保护方式使用权利，但更有可能以看似与伤害无关甚至造成伤害的非保护方式使用权利（实验1a至1c和实验2）。由于这些观念，人们对公司权利的支持程度低于对人权的支持程度（实验3）。然而，当我们将特定的公司权利表述为具有保护功能时，人们对其支持度更高（实验4）。同样由于这些观念，人们认为获得权利的公司比人类负有更大的道德责任（实验5a和5b）。尽管公司和人类在许多领域具有平等性，但人们认为它们使用权利的方式不同，最终导致对它们行为的不同反应以及不对称的道德评价。（《心理学文摘数据库记录》 ）
