Why Corporations are like Sociopaths

It's not even that corporations may be run by a sociopath - it's that corporations are inherently sociopathic.

Even in a corporation run by intelligent, reasonable, empathic human beings the board members and management typically operate at at least one remove from the people most affected by the negative consequences of their decisions - lower-level employees, consumers, people in third-world countries, etc.

Common psychological mechanisms like deindividuation, diffusion of responsibility and groupthink set in, and the individuals concerned are immersed in a business, economic and legislative environment which prioritises and promotes profit at the expense of all other considerations - often even prioritising short-term profit over greater long-term profit.

Even if boards of public corporations are/were able to resist these influences en-masse, they'd still have to contend with problems like the fact they're legally obliged to maximise company profits, so if company's profits and ethical behaviour come into conflict (and let's be honest, that's a virtually omnipresent situation in the world of business), if the board of a public company chooses the more moral but less profitable course of action they can actually be sued by their own shareholders.

Publicly-traded corporations are inherently sociopathic entities - they fail to conform to social norms expected of individuals (inasmuch as that's applicable to a collective group), they exhibit a myopic fixation on their own agenda and priorities, an insatiable fixation on profits at the expense of all other considerations, routine irresponsibility and a complete lack of remorse, a callous disregard for how their actions affect others, often a fixation with short-term gains over longer-term, sustainable advantage (a synonym for impulsivity or failure to plan ahead) and routine employment of deception.

If the average corporation was a human being we'd lock them up in a secure ward and throw away the key.

So we have an economy primarily composed of sociopathic entities with no functioning sense of empathy or remorse, and a hard-coded predisposition to chase profits at all costs. Given that the only way to make them reliably conform to social norms and exhibit socially-acceptable behaviours is by tweaking the economic environment such that it's in their own best interests to act the way we'd wish... which we've historically done mainly by enacting laws and regulationsthat mandate punishments for transgressions that outweigh any perceived benefit of those transgressions.

(Of course that fails miserably when we start resorting to slap-on-the-wrist punishments for multi-billion-dollar pollution or financial fraud cases because the incentives get all out of whack and it makes more sense for companies to just commit crimes then pay the fines than it does for them to act morally and legally... but that's a whole other discussion.)

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