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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.

Corporations play a fundamental role in society, and we need to make sense of them in terms of the complex structure that they actually have.

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?

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 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.”

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

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.

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In other words, if we pick out the brain regions that show activation 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 at decisions 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 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 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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