Corporate personhood – the idea that business entities may have some of the same legal rights and responsibilities as human beings – is a contentious legal concept. However, in his recent Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal (Our Brains Say Corporations Are People, Too), neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky cited studies showing that as far as the human brain is concerned, corporate personhood is not merely a legal concept. Quoting a portion of that column (emphasis added): Nothing about primate sociality predicts that corporations should constitute vaguely animate entities in our minds. Yet they do. This mind-set is shown most controversially with that strange American legal concept of “corporate personhood.” Research suggests that this is less of a metaphor than you’d think. In research published last year in the journal Social Neuroscience, Mark Plitt at Baylor College of Medicine and colleagues presented some of their 40…
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