Organizational Behavior and Human Decision …

1 Corporations are Cyborgs: Organizations elicit anger but not sympathywhen they can think but cannot feelTage S. Raia, , Daniel DiermeierbaKellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Road, Jacobs Center Room 501, Evanston, IL 60208, USAbKellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2001 Sheridan Road, Jacobs Center Room 502, Evanston, IL 60208, USAarticle infoArticle history:Received 21 May 2014 Accepted 5 October 2014 Available online 31 October 2014 Accepted by Francesca GinoKeywords:Moral judgmentMind perceptionMental state ascriptionOrganizationCorporate reputationAgencyExperienceVictimSympathy abstractAcross four experiments, participants saw companies as capable of having agentic mental states, such ashaving intentions, but incapable of having experiential mental states, such as feeling pain.

2 This differ-ence in mental state ascription caused companies to elicit anger as villains, but not sympathy as in sympathy were mediated by perceived capacities for experience. When participants had abackground leading companies ( senior executives) or when a recognizable brand ( Google) wasanthropomorphized, perceptions of experience increased and the sympathy gap disappeared. An organi-zation seen as high in experience and low in agency ( sports team) elicited more sympathy and lessanger than companies. Our findings elucidate the mechanisms underlying the link between mental stateascription and moral judgment; the tendency to ascribe some mental states to organizations more easilythan others; and the phenomenon whereby companies elicit anger as villains but fail to elicit sympathyas victims.

3 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights 2013, the retail company Target was the victim of a hackingattack that compromised the personal information of over 70million customers. As a result, some analysts have estimated thatTarget could be liable for anywhere between 400 million and dollars to help banks cover fraudulent charges resultingfrom the security breach (Webb, 2014). Target was clearly the vic-tim of a coordinated attack by organized criminals, but unlikeother victims of crime the company elicited no sympathy. Rather,the company was blamed for putting its customers at risk due toinappropriate responses during the attack and insufficient prepara-tion. Public sympathy was only expressed towards the Target cus-tomers whose data were compromised.

4 Target may indeed havebeen negligent in protecting its customers data. Still, the completeabsence of sympathy toward Target, and other companies thathave suffered similar security breaches, is striking. Why has Targetelicited only anger, while failing to elicit any sympathy?People perceive minds in groups (Waytz & Young, 2012), imbuebrands with personality traits (Aaker, 1997) and use principles ofperson-perception to guide their relationships with companies(Aaker, Vohs, & Mogilner, 2010; Kervyn, Fiske, & Malone, 2012;Jordan, Diermeier, & Galinsky, 2012). In the present paper, we askwhether this tendency to imbue groups and organizations with minds extends to all mental states, and if not, how differences inthe kinds of mental states that organizations are perceived as capa-ble of having inform moral judgments of those organizations, bothas villains and as victims of transgression.

5 By investigating mentalstate ascription and moral judgment across individuals and organi-zations, we aim to establish both an asymmetry in the mental statesthat tend to scale up from individuals to groups, as well as a fun-damental link between mental state reasoning and moral judg-ment. In so doing, we provide an explanation for why companiesoften elicit anger as villains but fail to elicit sympathy as , experience, and the mental capacities of companiesGray, Gray, and Wegner (2007)have argued that people actuallyperceive minds in terms of two fundamental dimensions. The firstdimension, referred to asagency, includes mental states related tothinking and taking actions, such as capacities for self-control,memory, learning, remembering, knowing, and intending.

6 The sec-ond dimension, referred to asexperience, includes mental statesrelated to feelings, such as capacities for experiencing hunger, pain, 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Corresponding Diermeier). Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 126 (2015) 18 26 Contents lists available atScienceDirectOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processesjournal homepage: pleasure. Unlike the warmth and competence dimensions inthe stereotype content model (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002),which refer to our perceptions of whether people or groups havegood or bad intentions and how competent they are, the agencyand experience dimensions focus on capacities to even havethoughts or feelings, regardless of their a pairwise comparison method,Gray et al.

7 (2007)demon-strated that different types of actors actually vary in their per-ceived capacities for the mental states captured by the agenticand experiential dimensions. Thus, whereas participants sawhuman adults as being high in both agency and experience, theysaw babies and non- Human mammals as low in agency but highin experience, while they saw God and robots as high in agencybut low in experience. Participants rated a dead person as compar-atively low in both agency and do companies fall in this categorization? No organiza-tions were present inGray et al. s (2007)survey. The closest evi-dence comes fromKnobe and Prinz (2008), who argued thatpeople see companies as high in intentionality , which looselymaps onto agency, but low in phenomenal consciousness , whichloosely maps onto experience.

8 In one study, participants rated sen-tences that expressed mental states tied to intentionality ( Acme Corp believes that its profit margin will soon increase ),as more natural than sentences that expressed mental states tiedto phenomenal consciousness ( Acme Corp is gettingdepressed ), suggesting that people may be more willing to ascribeagency than experience to companies. The authors hypothesizedthat phenomenal consciousness is more sensitive to the physicalconstitution of the actor, and that because groups are actors com-posed of other actors, they are ineligible for having phenomenalconsciousness. The authors did not provide an explanation forwhy phenomenal consciousness is more sensitive to the physicalconstitution of the actor than and Suben (2012)noted serious methodological con-cerns withKnobe and Prinz s (2008)studies, and suggested thatthe sentences the experimenters generated to test for naturalness may have been biased by their entering andSuben (2012)found that sentences that expressed intentionalityon the part of companies were only judged as more natural thansentences that expressed phenomenal-consciousness when theywere generated by a separate set of participants with that hypoth-esis in mind.

9 Sentences that expressed intentionality were notjudged any more natural than sentences that expressed phenome-nal consciousness when generated by participants testing thehypothesis that sentences expressing phenomenal consciousnesswould sound more natural. Thus, althoughKnobe and Prinz s(2008)findings are suggestive, they may not provide strong sup-port for the claim that people see companies as capable of agenticbut not experiential mental states, given that this was the hypoth-esis that the authors had in mind when generating the stimuli fortheir and Machery (2009) and Phelan, Arico, and Nichols(2012)have suggested thatKnobe and Prinz s (2008)effects maynot be due to different beliefs about the mental capabilities of com-panies or groups per se.

10 Rather, participants may interpret ques-tions about groups as actually referring to the specific individualsthat compose them andthe roles they play as members of thosegroups. Thus, instead of reflecting different beliefs about the mentalcapabilities of people and organizations, participants greater will-ingness to ascribe intentionality than phenomenal consciousnessto companies is simply due to the fact that when people work ina company, they are more highly associated with behaviors thatrequire intentionality, such as planning and goal-setting, thanbehaviors that require phenomenal consciousness, such as feelingjoy or being hungry. This explanation suggests that if the behaviorof members within an organization was more highly associatedwith behaviors that require phenomenal consciousness, then theeffects would of whether organizations are actually seen as having minds of their own or whether the people who compose thoseorganizations are seen differently when they are in the role of agroup member, these findings suggest that it may be more difficultto ascribe experience than agency to some organizations, and com-panies in particular.