Language is incredibly flexible in ways that enable us to communicate all kinds of complex concepts easily. One powerful tool is metonymy, in which we can refer to a broader entity using a specific quality of it. For example, when we refer to Fast Company, we can mean the publication that brings you articles like this one, or to the organization that publishes it.

From there, we can slip into language that treats organizations as beings. After reading this piece, you might say to someone, “I read in Fast Company, . . .” but you might also say something like “Fast Company says that. . . .” This latter formulation makes Fast Company sound as if it has thoughts and feelings.

Of course, that’s just a convenient way of speaking. Does it also reflect that people think of companies as having goals, thoughts, and feelings? Research by Simone Tang and Kurt Gray suggests that the answer may be yes.

In particular, Tang and Gray distinguish between feelings that an organization has agency and experience. Agency reflects whether the organization is seen as trying to affect the world around it. Experience reflects whether the organization is seen as having feelings and emotions.

Their research suggests that when organizations are described as having people who work for them who are mostly focused on achieving goals—and those goals are primarily about profit, success, and cost-effectiveness—then people think of organizations primarily as having agency. But when the people are described as caring about others and the organization pursues goals that are intended to influence the emotional experience of people who interact with them, then the organization itself is seen as having emotional experiences. Importantly, this finding held up even when the emotions related to the organization were negative (like anger).

But why does this matter?

The researchers point out that if organizations are seen as experiencing emotions, this may influence how people react to apologies made by organizations when they have done something wrong. After all, when a person does something wrong, you would like their apology to be meaningful. Part of that evaluation involves whether you think the person feels remorse and therefore will be inclined to act differently in the future.

The researchers gave descriptions of companies that would make people feel like the organization was primarily focused on profit and success or was primarily focused on creating and influencing emotional experience. The former description made people feel like the organization primarily had agency, while the latter made people feel like the organization had an experiential mind.

People were then told that the organization made a business error that caused its customers to have a bad experience and sometimes to be overcharged for goods. The organization then apologized for the error.

When people believed that the organization had emotional experiences, they felt that the apology was more sincere and were more likely to forgive the organization than if they believed the organization had only agency. There was something about the belief that the organization was capable of feeling remorse that influenced the effectiveness of the company at overcoming a significant mistake.

This research suggests that companies may benefit from developing a reputation of caring about the emotional experiences of customers in addition to the effectiveness of their business model. It can make apologies for errors more effective.

That said, there are a couple of potential downsides to being a company that is seen as having experiences. First—at least in these studies—there was a bit of a trade-off between agency and experience. Companies that were seen as having feelings were typically seen as less effective at achieving success and efficiency goals than those companies that were not seen as having and caring about feelings. So it is possible that focusing too much on feelings could leave an impression that the company is not that likely to be successful.

Second, a company that demonstrates itself to care can see that strategy backfire if it engages in bad actions or fails to apologize appropriately. This idea is similar to research demonstrating that companies that engage in a lot of corporate social responsibility programming can suffer a backlash if they engage in bad behaviors.

Ultimately, it’s important to recognize that people naturally slip into a mode in which organizations come to take on characteristics of people. Managing that impression is important for maintaining a company’s image.