Punishing Collective Entities

Abstract

This paper argues that, while the legal world treats corporate entities as “people” for legal purposes, this legal framing does not fit well with naive models of assessing responsibility and blame. These difficulties raise questions about the value of treating entities as “people” for legal purposes just at a time when the United States Supreme Court seems to be moving actively to increase this “entity as a person” legal metaphor. The paper first reviews the literature on the psychology of responsibility and then presents both survey and experimental data that compare reactions to individual and organizational level wrongdoing. We argue that the data suggest that people have greater trouble holding entities responsible for wrongdoing and punishing them than they do making judgments of responsibility and endorsing punitive actions for individuals. In an era of corporate scandal and wrongdoing, this difficulty points to a problem within the law — the process of punishing corporate misconduct is more problematic than the process of punishing individual misconduct.