Corporate Personification: A Mind/Body Metaphor Guides Blame for Organizational Wrongdoing

In cases of corporate wrongdoing, it is difficult to assign blame across multiple agents who played different roles. We propose that people metaphorize corporations and have dualist ideas of corporate hierarchies, with the boss as “the mind” and the employee as “the body” such that the employee appears to carry out the will of the boss. Three experiments tested whether people judge the boss to be more responsible and causally efficacious when the metaphor is made relatively more (vs. less) apt. We tested this by varying features of a boss giving orders to an employee consistent with features that bolster the sense that an individual's will causes their actions. This work suggests that the same features that tell us our minds cause our actions also facilitate the metaphor that a boss has willed the behavior of an employee and is ultimately responsible for bad outcomes in the workplace.