When corporations behave inappropriately, for example, by intentionally circumventing emissions regulation or jacking up the price of a life‐saving drug, assessing and assigning culpability is both natural and necessary. Such ascriptions of blame influence how consumers perceive and engage with corporations in the wake of misconduct. In a nationally representative sample of American adults, we examined how people's mental models of corporate wrongdoing influenced their awareness of and responses to a series of corporate scandals that broke between 2015 and 2017. Using a mixed effects modeling approach addressing both individual and scandal‐level variability, our results revealed that subscribing to the belief that corporate scandals are the product of the corporate culture (as opposed to the actions of a “few bad apples” within an organization) amplified people's awareness of, degree of concern about, and the probability of having taken action against transgressing corporations. The findings presented here highlight the importance of exploring consumers’ complex responses to corporate scandals, particularly for regulators and consumer advocates interested in leveraging public outcry to hold corporations responsible.

中文翻译：

---

从赦免到行动：审查美国人对备受瞩目的公司丑闻的反应 

当公司的行为不当时，例如有意绕过排放法规或抬高救生药物的价格，评估和确定犯罪责任既自然又必要。这种怪罪归因会影响消费者在不当行为之后对公司的看法和参与方式。在一个具有全国代表性的美国成年人样本中，我们研究了人们关于公司不法行为的心理模型如何影响他们对一系列在2015年至2017年间爆发的公司丑闻的认识和应对。使用混合效应建模方法来解决个人和丑闻层面的问题变化性，我们的研究结果表明，相信企业丑闻是企业文化的产物（而不是组织中“少数坏苹果”的行为），这增强了人们的意识，担忧程度以及对过犯的公司采取了行动。此处提出的调查结果强调了探索消费者对公司丑闻的复杂反应的重要性，特别是对于有兴趣利用公众强烈要求公司承担责任的监管者和消费者权益倡导者。