Shallow meritocracy

Peter Andre

No 405, SAFE Working Paper Series from Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE

Abstract: Meritocracies aspire to reward hard work and promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances into which they were born. However, circumstances often shape the choice to work hard. I show that people's merit judgments are "shallow" and insensitive to this effect. They hold others responsible for their choices, even if these choices have been shaped by unequal circumstances. In an experiment, US participants judge how much money workers deserve for the effort they exert. Unequal circumstances disadvantage some workers and discourage them from working hard. Nonetheless, participants reward the effort of disadvantaged and advantaged workers identically, regardless of the circumstances under which choices are made. For some participants, this reflects their fundamental view regarding fair rewards. For others, the neglect results from the uncertain counterfactual. They understand that circumstances shape choices but do not correct for this because the counterfactual-what would have happened under equal circumstances-remains uncertain.

Keywords: Meritocracy; fairness; responsibility; attitudes towards inequality; redistribution; social preferences; inference; uncertainty; counterfactual thinking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D63 D91 H23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/279572/1/186889715X.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Shallow Meritocracy (2022)
Working Paper: Shallow Meritocracy (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:safewp:279572

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3916303

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SAFE Working Paper Series from Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().