Abstract
Individuals sit on the board of directors and set organizational goals, individuals make the product, push new marketing campaigns, make tough decisions, create new products, and so on. What is the role of social responsibility (SR) in their thinking? Do individuals need to behave responsibly to live in a social environment? Could this be grounded in their cognition? Furthermore, is there room for SR in our cognitive processes? And then, how can this analysis help studies on socially responsible business? The article presents how the distributed cognition approach provides a viable explanation for SR in human thinking. The exploitation of external – both social and nonsocial – resources shapes cognitive processes such that the idea of the “isolated brain” is definitely abandoned. Our social cognition uses responsibility as a support mechanism that sustains or discharges distributive processes. The article uses the notion of docility to keep cognition and social behavior together. The conclusion is that SR is (1) a mechanism that allows individuals to maintain cognitive advantages and (2) it emerges when the same social channel is exploited for extended periods of time.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Domènec Melé (chairperson of the conference) and J. A. Puppim de Oliveira (chair of the session where the article was presented) for their comments. I think the article benefited tremendously from comments and advices of the two anonymous reviewers. All shortcomings and errors remain responsibility of the sole author.
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A previous version of this article was presented at the 15th IESE International Symposium on Ethics, Business and Society, Barcelona, Spain, May 16–17, 2008.
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Secchi, D. The Cognitive Side of Social Responsibility. J Bus Ethics 88, 565–581 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-009-0124-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-009-0124-y