The psychology of corporate rights: Perception of corporate versus individual rights to religious liberty, privacy, and free speech.

The U.S. Supreme Court has increasingly expanded the scope of constitutional rights granted to corporations and other collective entities. Although this tendency receives widespread public and media attention, little empirical research examines how people ascribe rights, commonly thought to belong to natural persons, to corporations. This article explores this issue in 3 studies focusing on different rights (religious liberty, privacy, and free speech). We examined participants' willingness to grant a given right while manipulating the type of entity at stake (from small businesses, to larger corporations, to for-profit and nonprofit companies), and the identity of the right holder (from employees, to owners, to the company itself as a separate entity). We further examined the role of political ideology in perceptions of rights. Results indicated a significant decline in the degree of recognition of entities' rights (the company itself) in comparison to natural persons' rights (owners and employees). Results also demonstrated an effect of the type of entity at stake: Larger, for-profit businesses were less likely to be viewed as rights holders compared with nonprofit entities. Although both tendencies persisted across the ideological spectrum, ideological differences emerged in the relations between corporate and individual rights: these were positively related among conservatives but negatively related among liberals. Finally, we found that the desire to protect citizens (compared with businesses) underlies individuals' willingness to grant rights to companies. These findings show that people (rather than corporations) are more appropriate recipients of rights, and can explain public backlash to judicial expansions of corporate rights.

Implications of research staff demographics for psychological science.

Long-standing research traditions in psychology have established the fundamental impact of social categories, such as race and gender, on people's perceptions of themselves and others, as well as on general human cognition and behavior. However, there is a general tendency to ignore research staff demographics (e.g., researchers' race and gender) in research development and research reports. Variation in research staff demographics can exert systematic and scientifically informative influences on results from psychological research. Consequently, research staff demographics need to be considered, studied, and/or reported, along with how these demographics were allowed to vary across participants or conditions (e.g., random assignment, matched with participant demographics, or included as a factor in the experimental design). In addition to providing an overview of multidisciplinary evidence of research staff demographics effects, it is discussed how research staff demographics might influence research findings through (a) ingroup versus outgroup effects, (b) stereotype and (implicit) bias effects, and (c) priming and social tuning effects. Finally, an overview of recommended considerations is included (see Appendix) to help illustrate how to systematically incorporate relevant research staff demographics in psychological science. (PsycINFO Database Record

Justice Without Borders: The Influence of Psychological Distance and Construal Level on Moral Exclusion.

The present research examines how psychological distance influences the weight given to individuating information about targets of justice judgments. Drawing on construal level theory, which links psychological distance to levels of construal, we hypothesize that increasing psychological distance from justice judgments reduces people's sensitivity to specific features of targets, thereby minimizing the extent to which applications of justice are influenced by target-specific information. Psychological proximity, by contrast, enhances the salience of targets' idiosyncratic characteristics, thereby leading to applications of justice that are more sensitive to targets' identity. Six studies, examining various justice principles, support these conclusions. Studies 1 to 3 show that psychological distancing reduces the weight of target-specific features in justice judgments. Supporting the role of construal level in driving these results, Studies 4 to 6 demonstrate parallel patterns when construal level is manipulated directly. This work offers a novel outlook on the role of construal and target characteristics in moral exclusion.