2.1. Corporations are people-like
The notion of corporate personhood has been in the news a lot lately as a result of Supreme Court’s ruling on
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, discussions of corporate tax rates, and the much publicized sound
bite, ‘‘Corporations are people, my friend’’ taken from presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign stop at the2011 Iowa State Fair. Despite how loaded the concept of corporate personhood can be in the legal and political arenas
(and the current authors’ own skepticism about the wisdom of the Citizens United decision), people nonetheless use
many of the same psychological processes to perceive, understand, and evaluate organizations as they do persons. To
be clear, our claim is not that corporations and persons are or should be equivalent in any sense; we mean only to assert
that there is utility in examining corporations as artificial persons (see Bradley, Brief, & Smith-Crowe, 2008).