Earlier this month, the Center for Corporate Citizenship teamed up with the Reputation Institute to create a list of the fifty companies with the best corporate citizenship reputations. We decided to compare these companies on GoodGuide, with the intention of seeing if perception matched reality.

So are we good at knowing which companies are doing right by society? Not really, considering all of the companies on the chart below (as the cream of the crop) should have high social scores.

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More on the CSR Index: To calculate the CSR Index, the Center for Corporate Citizenship and the Reputation Institute used results from a survey of about 8,000 online consumers. Consumers were asked about the performance of 285 companies across three dimensions (citizenship, governance and worker rights), and responses were aggregated to create the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Index. Scores fall between 0-100, with the top fifty companies scoring from 71-76. Note that not all companies from the list are rated by GoodGuide (so the sample above only includes 29 companies) and that scores for the remaining 235 companies were not made public.