Curran, K. and Hubbard, T. (2026). Feeling the fall: Immediate emotional responses to corporate misconduct and their impact on firm reputation Organization Studies.

Organisational reputation has long been understood as a rational stakeholder evaluation of expected future performance based on signals from past actions. Yet when people encounter news of organisational misconduct, these judgements are often immediate, emotional, and moral. How these emotional reactions influence reputation judgements remains poorly understood. To address this lack of understanding, we integrate social judgement research from social psychology with psychophysiological methods to study the affective dimensions of reputational decline. Across three experimental studies involving professionally produced news broadcasts featuring a high-reputation automobile manufacturer, we measure participants{\textquoteright} facial expressions, electrodermal activity, and survey-based reputation assessments. Study 1 (N = 245) demonstrates that character violations generate stronger negative emotions than competence violations. Study 2 (N = 90), conducted in a biometric laboratory, shows that combined character and competence violations produce the strongest negative emotions and elevate contempt{\textemdash}a moral emotion signalling rejection from the community{\textemdash}but not anger or disgust. Study 3 (N = 298) provides evidence of a partial indirect effect where negative emotions transmit the effect of combined violations on early reputational decline. Our findings make two primary contributions. First, our findings suggest that society{\textquoteright}s judgements of organisations are not formed solely through reflective evaluation. Rather, immediate emotional responses systematically accompany and mediate early reputation judgements, particularly when misconduct signals failures of organisational character. In particular, contempt emerges as a discrete moral emotion in stakeholders{\textquoteright} negative affective responses. Second, we illustrate how psychophysiological methods{\textemdash}including facial expression analysis and electrodermal activity measurement{\textemdash}can capture the spontaneous affective micro-processes underlying social evaluations.