Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Department of Psychology, Yale University, USA.
Cognition. 2022 Jul;224:105068. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105068. Epub 2022 Feb 26.
Whether the corporation should be considered a person is a matter of active academic and public debate. Here, we examine whether, and in what ways, ordinary citizens conceptualize the corporation as a person. We present evidence that corporations are anthropomorphized, but only to a certain degree. Compared with other entities, the average corporation is considered about as similar to a person as an ant. Corporations differ in the extent to which people are willing to grant them personhood however, and this pattern is predicted by how salient the organization's mental and moral traits are. This process of anthropomorphization has important downstream consequences, increasing support for granting legal rights and responsibilities to corporations. Because our studies show that this relationship also obtains for animals, we conclude that perceptions of corporate personhood draw on a more general set of rules for assessing an entity's personhood.
公司是否应被视为一个人，这是一个备受关注的学术和公众辩论的话题。在这里，我们探讨了普通公民如何将公司概念化为一个人，以及在哪些方面将公司概念化为一个人。我们提供的证据表明，公司被赋予了人格，但只是在一定程度上。与其他实体相比，普通公司被认为与蚂蚁的相似度与人的相似度大致相同。然而，人们愿意赋予公司人格的程度有所不同，而这种模式是由组织的心理和道德特征的显著程度所决定的。这种人格化的过程具有重要的下游影响，增加了赋予公司法律权利和责任的支持。由于我们的研究表明，这种关系也适用于动物，我们得出结论，对公司人格的看法借鉴了一套更普遍的规则，用于评估实体的人格。
