Do Corporations Have Minds? NYTimes.com

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6/15/2015 Do Corporations Have Minds? - NYTimes.com
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The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on
issues both timely and timeless.
Back in 2007, Viacom filed a copyright infringement lawsuit. It alleged
that the defendants had created a website that was hosting copyrighted
Viacom videos, including everything from the “The Colbert Report” to
“SpongeBob SquarePants.” But that was not all. Viacom made a series of
allegations about the defendants’ mental states. It alleged that they
specifically “intended” to host these illegal videos, that they were doing so
“knowingly” and with “brazen disregard” for the law.
So far, all of this may seem perfectly straightforward. But here is the
surprising part. The defendants in the suit were not individual human
beings. They were YouTube and its parent company, Google. In other
words, the entities that were alleged to have all of these intentions and
attitudes were actually corporations.
Cases like this one have long puzzled philosophers. In everyday speech,
it seems perfectly correct to say that a corporation can “intend,” “know,”
“believe,” “want” or “decide.” Yet, when we begin thinking the matter over
from a more theoretical standpoint, it may seem that there is something
deeply puzzling here. What could people possibly mean when they talk
about corporations in this way?
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One possible approach would be to try to dismiss this whole issue as
merely a misleading figure of speech. Sure, people sometimes describe a
corporation using words like “decides” or “knows,” but they don’t
necessarily mean this literally. Maybe all they really mean to say is that it is
able to take in certain information and then use that information to adjust
its plans and policies.
Then again, maybe the way people talk about corporations is getting at
something more fundamental. One of our most basic psychological
capacities is our ability to think about things as having mental states, such
as intentions and beliefs. Researchers refer to this capacity as “theory of
mind.” Our capacity for theory of mind appears to be such a fundamental
aspect of our way of understanding the world that we apply it even to
completely inanimate entities.
Think about it: Has it ever crossed your mind that your computer is out
to get you? Or that the big snowstorm somehow knew you needed to make
it home especially quickly this time? You might recognize on some level
that these entities don’t have minds, but all the same, some part of you
might be drawn to thinking of them in this way. Is it such a big leap, then,
to suppose that people might think of corporations as having intentions?
This is a disturbing thought. Corporations play an absolutely
fundamental role in contemporary society, and if we are going to react to
them appropriately, we need to make sense of them in terms of the complex
structure that they actually have. It is deeply worrisome to think that our
approach to understanding corporations might be shaped in part by a mode
of thought that would be more appropriate for understanding the minds of
individual human beings.
To put this idea to the test, I teamed up with the cognitive
neuroscientists Adrianna Jenkins, David Dodell-Feder and Rebecca Saxe,
and together we ran a study. Participants came into the lab and were given
a task that involved reasoning about corporations in much the same way
that people often do in ordinary life. This time, however, they were lying in
6/15/2015 Do Corporations Have Minds? - NYTimes.com
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an fMRI scanner that made it possible to look at the patterns of activation
within their brains. The key question was whether people thinking about
corporations would show the distinctive sort of neural response associated
with thinking of something as having mental states.
While lying in the scanner, participants read a series of sentences.
Some of the sentences just described the mental states of individual human
beings. For example, one of the sentences was:
George  thought  it  really  might  be  possible  to  make  a  killing  in
asparagus  sales.
Then other sentences described corporations and other large
organizations. For example, another sentence was:
United  Food  Corp.  thought  that  stocks  would  continue  to  go  up.
This design made it possible to compare what was happening in
people’s brains as they considered sentences of each of these types.
For the sentences about individual human beings, the results were
exactly what one would expect. We found activation in the medial
prefrontal cortex (MPFC), the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), and
the precuneus (PC). These are the regions that pretty much always show
activation when people are thinking about other people’s minds. In fact,
this collection of regions has come to be known as the “theory of mind
network.”
For the sentences about corporations, though, we found a result that
really caught us by surprise. The pattern of activation for these sentences
was completely indistinguishable from the one for sentences about
individual human beings. We found activation in all regions of the theory of
mind network. Not only that, we found activation to the same degree: There
were no significant differences in any of these regions between the
sentences about corporations and the sentences about human beings.
In other words, if we pick out the brain regions that show activation
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when you are thinking about another human being’s mind, we find
activation in those exact same brain regions when you are thinking about
Google. This result provides some evidence that people sometimes make
sense of corporations by applying their capacity for theory of mind.
But now one might raise another objection. Perhaps the sentences we
are examining are not really about corporations themselves; perhaps they
are actually about the individual human beings who control the
corporations. For example, when people say “Google intends,” it might be
that they are just using a convenient shorthand for something like “The
individual human beings who control Google intend…” If this view is on the
right track, it could be that people are simply applying theory of mind to a
bunch of individual human beings, not to the corporation itself.
To address this objection, we ran a quick follow-up study. In this study,
we gave people a series of brief vignettes about corporations and other
organizations. Then we asked in each case whether the organization itself
had a certain mental state and also whether the individual human beings in
the organization had that mental state. Strikingly, people were often happy
to say that the organization itself had a certain mental state even when they
thought that there wasn’t a single human being within the organization who
had that state.
For example, people are happy to say that NASA knows how to build a
space shuttle even if there is not a single individual human being within
NASA who knows how to build a space shuttle. In a case like this, people
are not thinking about the individual NASA employees; they are thinking
about NASA itself, the whole organization, and they are describing it by
saying that it “knows” certain things. Or, to take another example, consider
an organization that arrives atdecisions by aggregating the preferences of
its members according to some complicated rule. People are happy to say
that such an organization could decide to pursue a policy even if there were
no individual members who decided on that policy or showed any desire at
all for it to be implemented. Here again, people seem to be talking about
the organization as a whole, and they are describing the organization by
6/15/2015 Do Corporations Have Minds? - NYTimes.com
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saying that it “decided.”
Putting the results of our two experiments together, we acquire
evidence for a larger conclusion. It seems that a certain kind of
psychological process does involve theory of mind (from our first
experiment) and is directed at the corporations themselves (from the
follow-up experiment). Of course, we should not jump to any strong
conclusions based just on two studies — more research is necessary — but
we now have some serious evidence that indicates that people apply theory
of mind to corporations.
In saying this, I certainly don’t mean to imply that people hold a belief
that corporations have minds. Suppose that instead of conducting a
neuroimaging study, we had simply asked people, “Do you think that
Google has a mind?” Most likely, they would have given us a quizzical stare
and failed to understand what we were even asking. If they did take the
question seriously, they might have said something like, “Obviously not.
Google is a gigantic multinational institution. It could not possibly think or
feel anything at all.”
Still, our results suggest that things are more complex than they might
at first appear. Even if people believe on some level that corporations do
not have minds, they seem to be using the same sort of psychological
process for thinking about corporations that they use for thinking about the
minds of human beings.
This is a finding that should give us pause. When we are thinking
things over at a more intuitive level, it may seem obvious to us that
corporations should be severely punished for their misdeeds or that they
should be given legal rights, such as the right to free speech. But before we
accept these conclusions, we should take a moment to think about why it is
that they seem so compelling.
One possibility is that we have firmly in our minds a clear conception
of what a corporation is. Then perhaps we are concluding that this very
thing, a certain kind of bureaucratic institution, is deserving of severe
6/15/2015 Do Corporations Have Minds? - NYTimes.com
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punishment or of legal rights. If so, great; we have nothing to fear from the
experimental findings. But it is also possible that our thinking may be
taking a somewhat different turn. Despite all of our awareness of how
corporations really work, it may be that our conclusions about how they
should be treated are shaped in part by a psychological process that
understands them as having thoughts, goals and intentions, even when we
specifically believe that they do not.
Joshua  Knobe  is  a  professor  of  cognitive  science  and  philosophy  at
Yale  University  and  a  co-­editor  of  “Experimental  Philosophy.
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