Stanford University, CA, USA.
Willamette University, OR, USA.
Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2024 Jun;50(6):924-941. doi: 10.1177/01461672231151791. Epub 2023 Feb 16.
Individuals tend to hold a dim view of for-profit corporations, believing that profit-seeking comes at the expense of ethicality. In the present research, we show that this belief is not universal; rather, people associate ethicality with an organization's . Across nine experiments ( = 4,796), people stereotyped large companies as less ethical than small companies. This size-ethicality stereotype emerged spontaneously (Study 1), implicitly (Study 2), and across industries (Study 3). Moreover, we find this stereotype can be partly explained by perceptions of profit-seeking behavior (Supplementary Studies A and B), and that people construe profit-seeking and its relationship to ethicality when considering large and small companies (Study 4). People attribute greater profit- motives (relative to profit- motives) to large companies, and these attributions shape their subsequent judgments of ethicality (Study 5; Supplementary Studies C and D).
个体倾向于对盈利性公司持有负面看法，认为追求利润是以牺牲道德性为代价的。在本研究中，我们表明这种信念并非普遍存在；相反，人们将道德性与组织的 联系在一起。通过九项实验（n=4796），人们将大公司视为比小公司更不道德。这种规模与道德的刻板印象是自发出现的（研究 1），内隐的（研究 2），并且跨越了多个行业（研究 3）。此外，我们发现这种刻板印象可以部分归因于对盈利行为的看法（补充研究 A 和 B），并且人们在考虑大公司和小公司时会构建盈利行为及其与道德性的关系（研究 4）。人们将更大的盈利动机（相对于盈利动机）归因于大公司，这些归因会影响他们对道德性的后续判断（研究 5；补充研究 C 和 D）。
