Why are some people less outraged by corporate misdeeds?

A new study suggests that individuals who prefer social systems with clear hierarchies tend to judge corporate wrongdoing less harshly than people who favor equality. This tendency appears to be independent of whether a person identifies as politically liberal or conservative. The research, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, provides evidence for a consistent link between anti-egalitarian views and leniency toward corporate transgressions.

Researchers have devoted significant attention to understanding how ideology shapes moral judgments of individuals. However, less is known about how these beliefs influence perceptions of organizations, such as corporations, when they commit wrongdoing. Given that the ideologies of judges, politicians, and voters can affect the consequences for corporate misconduct, understanding this connection is of practical importance.

“This project was originally motivated by a seeming paradox: On the one hand, people who advocate for ‘corporate personhood’ doctrines tend to hold less egalitarian worldviews. Yet research in moral psychology suggests that attributing more human traits to actors is associated with holding them to higher moral standards,” said study author Jeffrey Lees, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the University of Groningen.

“It seemed implausible that people who have more favorable views of large corporations would in turn be more (rather than less) harsh in response to corporate misconduct, so we sought to examine these relationships empirically and see if this paradox held.”

The investigation focused on a specific ideological preference known as social dominance orientation, or SDO. This is a psychological term for a person’s preference for social systems arranged in a hierarchy, where some groups have more power and status than others. People high in SDO tend to support ideas and actions that maintain or strengthen these social hierarchies.

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The researchers reasoned that since many corporations are themselves hierarchical and can serve to enhance existing social inequalities, people high in SDO might view them more favorably. This could lead them to downplay the seriousness of corporate misconduct. They proposed a specific pathway for this effect: that people high in SDO might perceive offending corporations as having less “agency,” or the capacity to plan and act with intention. According to theories of moral psychology, attributing less agency to an entity generally leads to less blame.

To test these ideas, the research team conducted a series of four main studies, along with several supplemental ones. The first study aimed to establish the basic relationship between SDO and moral judgments of corporate misbehavior. For this study, 127 participants were recruited online through Amazon’s TurkPrime platform.

These participants read five short, fictional scenarios describing different types of corporate misconduct. One scenario, for example, described a transportation company knowingly shipping counterfeit goods produced with sweatshop labor. After reading each story, participants rated how immoral, wrong, and unethical the company’s actions were. They also completed a 16-item questionnaire to measure their level of social dominance orientation and a single question about their political orientation, from very liberal to very conservative.

The analysis of this first study indicated that individuals with higher SDO scores tended to rate the corporate misconduct as less immoral. This relationship remained even after accounting for participants’ political orientation. This finding provides evidence that a preference for social hierarchy, specifically, is connected to more lenient judgments of corporate wrongdoing.

“Most people, including most liberals and conservatives, react very negatively to corporate misconduct, and want to see corporate misconduct punished,” Lees told PsyPost. “However, there is a small subset of the population who are quite lenient toward corporate misconduct, and that group of people are anti-egalitarians. These are people who like social hierarchy, they think a world where a small few rule and dominate over others is a good world, and they tend to endorse coercive actions that lead to such a world. These types of individuals also tend to be misery, selfish, and prejudicial.”

A second, larger study was designed to investigate the proposed explanation for this relationship, involving the perception of corporate agency. This study recruited 666 U.S. residents through the Prolific platform. Participants read four different vignettes about organizational misconduct, similar to those in the first study.

For each scenario, they rated the immorality of the company’s actions. They also rated the organization’s perceived “agency,” which included its capacity for intention and planning, as well as its “experience,” its capacity for feeling emotions and pain. Participants then completed the SDO scale and demographic questions. The order in which participants rated immorality and the corporation’s mental capacities was varied to see if one influenced the other.

The results of this study supported the researchers’ initial model. Higher SDO was associated with attributing less agency to the corporations, which in turn was linked to more lenient moral judgments. The findings suggest that the perception of a corporation’s ability to plan and act intentionally partially explains why people high in SDO are less condemnatory of its misdeeds.

To further test their ideas, the researchers designed a third study to see if the link between SDO and perceived agency would appear even in a neutral context, without any mention of misconduct. They also introduced the concept of perceived threat. The team recruited a nationally representative sample of 790 U.S. residents from Prolific.

Participants viewed an image of a generic corporate building and read a brief, neutral description of a fictional company. They then rated the company’s agency and experience, as well as how threatening, unfriendly, and antagonistic it seemed. Following this, they completed a short-form SDO scale.

Contrary to the researchers’ expectations from earlier, unpublished work, this study did not find a link between SDO and perceptions of corporate agency in this neutral context. SDO was also not associated with how threatening the corporation seemed. This result complicated the initial theory, suggesting the connection between SDO and perceived agency might only emerge when a company has done something wrong.

A fourth study returned to a scenario involving corporate wrongdoing to re-examine the roles of agency and threat. For this experiment, 766 participants from Prolific read about a company that knowingly transported counterfeit products. They then rated the company’s agency, its experience, and the level of “proximal threat” it posed, meaning how concerned or worried they would feel if the company operated in their own town.

Again, the evidence was not straightforward. People higher in SDO did report feeling less threatened by the misbehaving corporation, which aligned with the researchers’ predictions. However, SDO was not connected to how much agency they attributed to the company in this study, and perceived agency was not related to perceived threat. This pattern of results suggests the psychological mechanism behind the SDO-leniency link is more complex than originally hypothesized.

“The relationship between anti-egalitarian worldviews and leniency toward corporate misconduct was strong and consistent, including after controlling statistically for other ideological measures like liberalism-conservatism,” Lees added. “This provides strong evidence that the motives to maintain social hierarchy and inequality are a driving force behind leniency toward corporate misconduct.”

However, “to our surprise, anti-egalitarians do not exhibit any type of ‘corporate personhood’ preference. Even in the context of neutral corporations (i.e., with no mention of misconduct), anti-egalitarians are not more likely to attribute human qualities to corporations.”

Lees added that “our findings should not be interpreted to mean that anti-egalitarians are pro-misconduct. It is not that they are supportive of the harms of corporate misconduct, they just are much less likely to condemn that misconduct and want to see it punished.”

Future research could explore other potential mechanisms that might explain the findings. It may also be beneficial for researchers to examine different types of organizations, such as non-profits, or to develop more refined ways of measuring concepts like agency and threat in the context of corporate behavior. This work opens new avenues for understanding how deeply held ideological beliefs shape public responses to the actions of powerful organizations.

“Our next steps involve investigating the underlying cognitive mechanisms driving anti-egalitarians’ leniency,” Lees said. “Our study finds mixed evidence for the role of threat perceptions and personhood attributions, so we want to investigate this further.”

“This work is deeply indebted to the late Professor Jim Sidanius, who was working with us on this project when he passed away in 2021. He was a great mentor and inspiration, and he is sorely missed.”

The study, “Anti-Egalitarians Are Lenient Toward Corporate Misconduct: Mixed Evidence for the Role of Threat and Mind Perception,” was authored by Jeffrey Lees, Simone Tang, and James Sidanius.