| Abstract: | The decision rules individuals use to judge wrongdoing committed inside corporations and other hierarchical organizations are not well understood. We explore this issue by asking random samples of individuals in Moscow, Tokyo, and Washington, D. C., to respond to four short vignettes describing acts of wrongdoing by people in corporations. The vignettes are experiments that manipulate the actor's mental state, the actor's position in the organization, and whether the actor's decision was influenced by others in the organization. We examine (1) the distribution of responsibility among people in the organization, (2) how individual responsibility affects the attribution of responsibility to the organization itself, and (3) cross-national differences in attributions. We find that both what the actors did (their deeds) and the position they occupied (their roles) significantly influence the responsibility attributed to them. The responsibility attributed to the organizations themselves is a function of the responsibility attributed to the actors inside the organization, but not a function of the independent variables in the experiments. Cross-national differences emerge with respect to the responsibility assigned both to individuals and to the organizations themselves. We discuss implications of these results for past and future work. |
