One of the most striking phenomena in the contemporary legal world is the shift toward holding group entities such as corporations responsible for harm. Legal and social changes have produced a gradual movement away from individual responsibility for injuries toward a collective source of responsibility--the organization. Today business corporations are expected to provide compensation for injuries that in earlier times would have been attributed to individuals or to fate. Despite a good deal of legal scholarship on the shift toward holding businesses culpable for harms, little systematic work has been done on lay views of corporate responsibility. Basic knowledge about public views is critical because public attitudes influence substantive law and legal procedure in a variety of ways and likely also affect the behavior of corporations. This research is intended to provide the first systematic account of lay views of corporate responsibility for wrongdoing. A series of interrelated studies employing multiple methods will be conducted to examine why people hold corporations responsible. The first approach is a telephone survey of a random sample of 450 residents from a single mid-Atlantic state. The survey will provide a profile of the content, structure, and individual determinants of general attitudes toward corporate wrongdoing. The second approach is an interview study of jurors who have participated in civil trials with corporations or businesses as parties. Comparisons of interview and public opinion data will show whether jurors who decide issues of corporate responsibility within a rich and detailed legal setting reflect the same concerns and attitudinal structures of survey respondents. A final set of studies uses the experimental method of mock jury simulation to examine factors affecting judgments of corporate responsibility for wrongdoing. These experiments will test the impact of financial resources and identity (individual versus type of corporation) of the defendant on judgments of wrongdoing. The project is designed to provide convergent data on the key factors that lead the public to hold corporations responsible for harmdoing. Often, the failure to take action against corporate lawlessness has been justified by claims that the public sees such lawlessness as "morally neutral" behavior. This research will illuminate the conditions under which citizens support intervention in the corporate community. More generally, the research will advance understanding of the problem of collective responsibility. Collective responsibility issues arise for a variety of groups and organizations such as governments, political parties, and voluntary associations. Furthermore, the responsibility of groups is an important matter in the criminal justice system in cases involving conspiracy, complicity, and accessories to crime.
