‘Where there is a will, there is a way’: Belief in school meritocracy and the social‐class achievement gap

Darnon, Céline; Wiederkehr, Virginie; Dompnier, Benoît; Martinot, Delphine

doi:10.1111/bjso.12214

Cited by 32 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…Fourteen experiments were conducted within an applied field. The majority were conducted in an organizational context (e.g., Castilla and Benard, 2010), two studies took place in the educational context (Darnon et al, 2017, 2018), two others were aggregated into a health-related domain (Quinn and Crocker, 1999; Newsom, 2014), two experiments were conducted within moral dilemmas scenarios (Moreira, 2016) and one in a social domain (Levy et al, 2006). The remainder experiments were unspecified domain-wise.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A detailed overview of the Meritocracy Activation (MA) is depicted in Table S1. Five multi- experiments present an original prime aiming to activate aspects of the Meritocracy construct (Chatard et al, 2006; McCoy and Major, 2007; Pereira et al, 2009; Castilla and Benard, 2010; Redersdorff et al, 2016; Darnon et al, 2017, 2018), four primes focused on Protestant Work Ethic (Katz and Hass, 1988; Biernat et al, 1996; Quinn and Crocker, 1999; Levy et al, 2006) and two primes focused on perceptions of success and social mobility (Ho et al, 2002; Ryan et al, 2012). The remaining used either the same and modified version of the original or one of the primes mentioned above.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The way the priming effectiveness has been assessed differs as a function of the type of task used to temporarily activate Meritocracy beliefs. While some studies measure the salience of meritocracy (Redersdorff et al, 2016), others measure the extent to which subjects endorse meritocracy beliefs (Levy et al, 2006; Castilla and Benard, 2010; Darnon et al, 2017). Consequently, the heterogeneity described both in the nature of the prime and in the forms that activation and the manipulation checks can assume, makes it challenging for researchers to ascertain the best content for meritocracy activation, and the best practices for implementing manipulation checks (Hauser et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Primes and Consequences: A Systematic Review of Meritocracy in Intergroup Relations

et al. 2019

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Psychological interest in Meritocracy as an important social norm regulating most of the western democratic societies has significantly increased over the years. However, the way Meritocracy has been conceptualized and operationalized in experimental studies has advanced in significant ways. As a result, a variety of paradigms arose to understand the social consequences of Meritocracy for intergroup relations; in particular, to understand the adverse consequences of Meritocracy for disadvantaged group members. The present research seeks to understand whether there is strong support for the idea that (manipulated) Meritocracy disproportionally affects members of low status groups, and also to understand which specific components of this norm have been successfully manipulated and to what consequences. And this is particularly important given the recent call for greater transparency in how the success of experimental manipulations is reported. Thus, we carried out a systematic review examining the content of different prime tasks, summarizing prime manipulation checks' effectiveness, and analyzing whether priming Meritocracy leads to less favorable orientations toward low status groups. Results across 33 studies revealed that despite the existing differences in the components highlighted, the salience of any of the Meritocracy dimensions facilitates the use of internal causal attributions, negative evaluations and stereotyping toward low status groups, affecting negatively decisions involving low-status group members, particularly in specific domains, as organizational contexts. These results carry both practical and theoretical implications for future research on the role of Meritocracy in intergroup settings.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Primes and Consequences: A Systematic Review of Meritocracy in Intergroup Relations

et al. 2019

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“…To the extent that this helps middle‐class children to outperform their working‐class peers, the ‘meritocratic’ belief that such performance differences are due to differences in ability and/or effort will serve to ‘explain’ and legitimate unequal performance. Consistent with this argument, Darnon, Wiederkehr, Dompnier, and Martinot () primed the concept of merit in French fifth‐grade schoolchildren and found that this led to lower scores on language and mathematics tests – but that this only applied to low‐SES children. Moreover, the effect of the merit prime on test performance was mediated by the extent to which the children endorsed meritocratic beliefs.…”

Section: Contexts That Shape Self‐construal: Home School and Workmentioning

confidence: 87%

The psychology of social class: How socioeconomic status impacts thought, feelings, and behaviour

Manstead

2018

British J Social Psychol

513

345

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Drawing on recent research on the psychology of social class, I argue that the material conditions in which people grow up and live have a lasting impact on their personal and social identities and that this influences both the way they think and feel about their social environment and key aspects of their social behaviour. Relative to middle‐class counterparts, lower/working‐class individuals are less likely to define themselves in terms of their socioeconomic status and are more likely to have interdependent self‐concepts; they are also more inclined to explain social events in situational terms, as a result of having a lower sense of personal control. Working‐class people score higher on measures of empathy and are more likely to help others in distress. The widely held view that working‐class individuals are more prejudiced towards immigrants and ethnic minorities is shown to be a function of economic threat, in that highly educated people also express prejudice towards these groups when the latter are described as highly educated and therefore pose an economic threat. The fact that middle‐class norms of independence prevail in universities and prestigious workplaces makes working‐class people less likely to apply for positions in such institutions, less likely to be selected and less likely to stay if selected. In other words, social class differences in identity, cognition, feelings, and behaviour make it less likely that working‐class individuals can benefit from educational and occupational opportunities to improve their material circumstances. This means that redistributive policies are needed to break the cycle of deprivation that limits opportunities and threatens social cohesion.

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“…First, education has become a key predictor of life chances (e.g., [12]), making social inequalities in educational outcomes especially important. Second, education is highly valued in societies and often perceived to be a countervailing force against classbased inequalities, yet evidence demonstrates that educational institutions channel and reinforce inequalities [3,13,14,15,16,17]. Third, differences in education are fueling contemporary political rifts.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The socioecology of social class

Manstead

Easterbrook

Kuppens

2020

Current Opinion in Psychology

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Influence of social class on thought and behavior depends on specifics of social context • This is because people compare themselves with others on locally relevant dimensions • Context shapes the relevance of social comparison dimensions (e.g., education, income, ethnicity) and also the outcomes of such comparisons • Differences in income are more predictive of social and political attitudes in countries with high economic inequality • Differences in education are more predictive of social and political attitudes in countries with higher proportions of higher educated people • Interventions that reduce educational inequalities among certain groups in one socioecological context may operate differently in other contexts.

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‘Where there is a will, there is a way’: Belief in school meritocracy and the social‐class achievement gap

Cited by 32 publications

References 48 publications

Primes and Consequences: A Systematic Review of Meritocracy in Intergroup Relations

Primes and Consequences: A Systematic Review of Meritocracy in Intergroup Relations

The psychology of social class: How socioeconomic status impacts thought, feelings, and behaviour

The socioecology of social class

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