This summary is provided by the IPR ESG & Purpose Research Library.
Dr. Matthew Amengual and colleagues examined how individuals perceive corporate involvement in human rights violations.
A survey of 2,420 U.S. adults was conducted from March – April 2021. Participants were asked to give their reactions to hypothetical situations involving a multinational enterprise and a human rights violation.
Key findings include:
1.) Participants reacted differently to different kinds of human rights abuses.
— Participants were most likely to view companies associated with child labor as involved in a human rights violation.
— Participants were less likely to associate companies with human rights violations when the companies failed to pay a living wage, contaminated a community’s land, or engaged in discrimination.
2.) Participants were more forgiving if companies had conducted due diligence.
— When a company identified a potential abuse and tried to prevent it, participants were 15 percentage points less likely to judge the company as being involved in a human rights violation than in cases where the company did not try to identify potential abuses.
3.) Americans hold companies to their own individual standards — not local ones.
— Participants were not particularly sensitive to local views of what constituted acceptable behavior.
4.) The court of public opinion relies more on individual reasoning than a reference to law.
Find the original journal article here.
