Anti-Egalitarians Are Lenient Toward Corporate Misconduct: Mixed Evidence for the Role of Threat and Mind Perception

Although people’s ideological beliefs are key to understanding how they make moral judgments, existing research has been silent on how such ideological beliefs drive their psychological perceptions of corporations and their responses to corporate misconduct. Across multiple studies we consistently found that people high in social dominance orientation (SDO) judge organizational transgressions less harshly. These results generalized across organizational size and industry, and they were not explained by political orientation. However, evidence for the mechanism for this relationship, including the role of mind perception and perceived threat, was mixed. We discuss possible reasons for such mixed evidence and the theoretical implications of the findings.