![]() ![]() This is surprising because impartiality is the core of meritocracy’s moral appeal. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value. They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. The management scholar Emilio Castilla at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based compensation in private companies. Perhaps more disturbing, simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behaviour. ![]() Frank cites a study in which simply asking subjects to recall the external factors (luck, help from others) that had contributed to their successes in life made them much more likely to give to charity than those who were asked to remember the internal factors (effort, skill). While this was found to be true of all participants, the effect was much more pronounced among the ‘winners’.īy contrast, research on gratitude indicates that remembering the role of luck increases generosity. Just having the idea of skill in mind makes people more tolerant of unequal outcomes. The economists Aldo Rustichini at the University of Minnesota and Alexander Vostroknutov at Maastricht University in the Netherlands found that subjects who first engaged in a game of skill were much less likely to support the redistribution of prizes than those who engaged in games of chance. ![]() Players who were (falsely) led to believe they had ‘won’ claimed more for themselves than those who did not play the skill game. In research at Beijing Normal University, participants played a fake game of skill before making offers in the ultimatum game. One variation on this game shows that believing one is more skilled leads to more selfish behaviour. If the amount to be shared is $100, most offers fall between $40-$50. The experiment has been replicated thousands of times, and usually the proposer offers a relatively even split. If the responder rejects the offer, neither player gets anything. The ‘ultimatum game’ is an experiment, common in psychological labs, in which one player (the proposer) is given a sum of money and told to propose a division between him and another player (the responder), who may accept the offer or reject it. In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best.Īccording to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. In his book Success and Luck (2016), the US economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates’s stellar rise as Microsoft’s founder, as well as to Frank’s own success as an academic. This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘ grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Under meritocracy, wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events.Īlthough widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. Conceptually and morally, meritocracy is presented as the opposite of systems such as hereditary aristocracy, in which one’s social position is determined by the lottery of birth. The most common metaphor is the ‘even playing field’ upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life-money, power, jobs, university admission-should be distributed according to skill and effort. Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. ‘We must create a level playing field for American companies and workers.’-Donald Trump, inaugural address, 2017 ‘We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else …’-Barack Obama, inaugural address, 2013 ![]()
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