The Illusion Of Meritocracy II
The purpose of this article is to explain why I called it that and why meritocracy has become, to a large extent, an illusion. Although I intend to explain some cognitive processes that give rise to attributions that influence the meritocratic reward system at the social and economic level, it’s not intended to be seen as psychological determinism but rather to recognize how helpful social and cognitive psychology are in understanding how individuals attribute the causes of success and failure.
When we talk about illusions, we are talking about cognition that is not free of errors and shortcuts that serve the purposes of genetic replication or resource conservation. Some of our hundreds of cognitive biases may act as a barrier and infringe upon fair selection and logical judgments.
Meritocracy itself can be considered a societal bias, one that may reveal its eventual illusion of control. One of the first manifestations of attributional errors individuals make in meritocratic societies seems to be conditioned by self-serving attributions when explaining the causes of success and failure (Luginbuhl et al., 1975). A simple example of one of the most well-known biases among cognitive psychologists, the self-serving bias, can be seen in the success of entrepreneurs and companies. Here, the entrepreneur’s ability, talent, or even age (internal causes) is emphasized. Failure, on the other hand, is usually attributed to macroeconomic difficulties, insufficient capital, or obstacles beyond the founders’ capabilities. In other words, situations beyond their control (external causes) (Stevens and Jones, 1976). In the case of moral failures, such as crimes, the attributions have a tendency toward naïvety and positioning as a victim of circumstances. In other words, the responsibility for failure lies with the environment, not the individual (Kelley, 1971).
Immediate-environment observers of high-status individuals tend to agree with these types of attributions, even though high-status individuals enjoy advantages such as, educational, social and monetary capital. On the other hand, when low-status or under-resourced individuals fail to achieve similar results, the roles are reversed, leading to an apparent fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977), as observers have little doubt that they are lazy, untalented, and deserve failure (Jost, et al., 2000) because they didn’t work hard enough. Such individualistic reductionisms induced by meritocratic beliefs lead people to hastily conclude that all outcomes are unquestionably the product of individual agency.
People’s inferences about meritocracy say that institutions take effort and talent as the main (sometimes the only) criteria for deservingness in contests for opportunity. Economic institutions, contrary to people’s inferences, take outcomes as the main criteria for distribution, which leads to wide disparities in the effort individuals exert for outcomes because of the socio-ecological interactions of these: the attainment of an outcome — even if it’s instrumental in achieving another — can be understood as a system of forces composed of individual and environmental forces in a hypothetical field analogous to Lewin’s theoretical field of forces (Lewin, 1935). The speed of an individual’s force toward an outcome depends on his or her effort, ability, creativity, persistence, autonomy, etc. In addition, environmental forces, which can have forces in any direction and potency, include forces that push the individual toward a result, as well as opposing forces that reduce the individual’s speed, such as obstacles. Individual forces (effort) are under the individual’s control, while environmental forces (luck) aren’t.
In other words, outcomes are determined by the sum of the individual’s agency plus the agency of those around him, so some of the outcomes people achieve depend to some extent on environmental forces beyond their control. This appeals to basic premises about ecological dynamics, in which individual agency not only benefits the individual but also affects the environment (Bandura, 1997).
Environmental forces and privileges alone are not sufficient to produce the expected outcomes, and the quality of these forces and privileges may vary from individual to individual. Similarly, effort alone is not always the sole cause of the achievement of outcomes, and the amount of effort in relation to an outcome also varies from individual to individual in terms of proportionality and contingency. It is not just because you work hard that you are guaranteed a reward.
Ignoring these forces and being driven by competitionalists tendencies gives way to assimilation bias (Aarts et al., 2002) and contrast effects (Stapel et al., 2001) in comparisons that are mostly based on extreme examples of the normal distribution. How do we distribute equal opportunity when standardized tests or applications can’t get the whole story? Or when institutions pay full attention to outcomes while completely ignoring their motives and causes? Perhaps they simply fall prey to outcome bias, making distribution more arbitrary than we thought. Ad hominem reduction then alters our reality by stacking attributions and exaggerating the credit for individual effort.
In many societies, meritocracy has become so normalized and integrated at the belief level that it is accepted even by those who are harmed by it, who appeal to the just-world fallacy by viewing current systems of distribution as legitimate and blaming no one but themselves for their lack of opportunity and supposed responsibility for their disadvantages (Jost, 2008). Such a distortion of reality is how rewards are distributed and justified.
The rhetoric of rising, which says that anyone can achieve whatever they dream of if they just believe in themselves, develop grit, and work hard, has had the positive effect of creating people with stronger beliefs and high ambitions who feel capable of achieving them, and an increasingly internal locus of causality, aka growth mindset, which in turn sometimes becomes an irresponsible way to appeal to self-efficacy, especially when trying to inspire disadvantaged individuals who clearly need more resources and freedom than just grit and belief in themselves to achieve their goals. Ad hominem reduction, in an attempt to inspire, achieves only to offend. Do these excessive attributions instead reinforce our illusion of control?
All these individualistic attributions of stratospheric success satisfy the collective desire for controllability, predictability, and stability of the environment and reinforce the beliefs that confirm such attributions. Virtuous or vicious cycle? In the same vein, it can be seen as positive for a person to attribute and believe that he or she is the sole determinant of his or her outcomes, which presupposes a growth mindset. However, a growth mindset in the form of attributions to the individual in the midst of failures, even when the underlying causes are primarily environmental, can leave personal helplessness, low self-esteem, and mental health problems (Abramson et al. 1978, 1989). The feelings caused by adverse events that give rise to depression are usually attributed to being within the control of the individual. It appears that the growth mindset has a dark side.
Meritocracy (de facto) as a system of justification simply adds more cruelty while blackmailing disadvantaged people whose lack of privilege hinders their social mobility, forcing them to compensate for such disadvantages by making above-average and sometimes disproportionate efforts to achieve the same results and meet the conditions of economic exchange, so that those who don’t achieve such results are seen as deserving it.
Sandell (2019), illustrating increased meritocratic beliefs states that in recent decades, Harvard students have increasingly believed they deserve their admission. As the admissions system has become more competitive, the thresholds for applicants have also become higher, requiring more effort and external resources to overcome such thresholds. More perceived effort on the part of candidates results in more feelings of deservingness, but this doesn’t necessarily mean more merit because of the subjective nature of the effort. Paying more attention to effort doesn’t imply more deservingness, especially when effort is not the only force in achieving an outcome.
Our attention is usually focused on what’s missing, our pains, our needs, and getting to final states. We eat when we’re hungry and take painkillers when we feel pain. Logically, we tend to take for granted and even ignore what we already have, what we don’t miss, the absence of pain. Since our effort and perseverance take up almost all of our attention while we’re producing a result, especially when we’re exerting great effort, it’s normal to attribute effort as the sole cause of achievement to the point of modifying our beliefs in favor of individual attributes (Stiensmeier-Pelster et al., 2018). Nevertheless, we shouldn’t fall into the reality modification trap. Instead, we should recognize the external forces in the social system that directly, indirectly, and serendipitously benefit us toward our goals, rather than just solipsistic thinking that derivatives in ad hominem meritocracy. Who can be the ultimate arbiter of deservingness among the mismatched perceptions actors and observers have of subjective effort, and taken-for-granted privilege?
Could deservingness be measured as an (inverse) function of heteronomy? The younger you are, the more heteronomy you have. In early childhood, what is not controlled by genetics is controlled by the environment and the people around us, especially our parents, our autonomy and control over our behavior are fundamentally null. As social sponges, the first cultural values, beliefs, codes, and education are learned by osmosis, almost unfiltered and unconsciously. Although adolescents gain autonomy, they still have little control, for example, over their education, which continues until the age of twenty or beyond. At this age, when a large part of one’s destiny is determined, to what extent can knowledge or social class be ascribed to the environment, and to what extent can it be ascribed to the individual’s autonomy?
Should merit change with the degree of obedience, autonomy, or even autarchy? After all, obedience implies more influence from the environment and by extension, more luck, which presumably means less effort compared to those who think and decide for themselves or those who behave in a more self-reliant manner. Autonomy is largely absent as a criterion of deservingness in meritocratic systems.
From another perspective, just as we should not take pride in our privilege as opposed to our effort and ability, we can question the point of devoting cognitive resources and attention to variables beyond our control. But we must also try to understand how the world and the mechanisms of collective agency work, apart from false exclusion, false causation, and societal selfish dispositions.
Meritocratic schemata invite us to believe that environmental circumstances distribute in an orderly fashion and to overestimate the controllability of the individual, who is presented as the only determinant of his or her fate, pretending that effort is the only necessary and sufficient condition to achieve any goal, ignoring the distribution of knowledge, monetary, social or cultural capital.
The lack of consistency created by these attributions (as well as the discrepancy between actor and observer attributions, i.e. actor-observer bias) brings to the fore that individuals tend to claim more merit and attribute more based on what they find satisfactory rather than what an objective personal causation analysis would suggest (Jones, 1973). Even information that contradicts self-esteem and self-concept may be ignored or denied (Festinger, 1957; Heider, 1958).
Because people tend to react negatively when success is perceived as undeserved (Feather 1990, 1994), these biases may be self-protective (Stiensmeier-Pelster, Kammer, & Adolphs, 1988). It also may explain why people claim ability and effort as the only causes of success. After all, if achievements are more the result of luck than effort, people may be accused of not deserving them — even of being the beneficiaries of injustice — whereas an achievement attributed to effort and ability provides a sense of justice by giving individuals what they have worked for.
Ironically, some people who believe that the person is the only determinant of her fate are sometimes the first to fall prey to their own cognitive biases, arguing that scientific evidence shows that this is how they behave, treating them as inexorable laws or phenomena from which there is no escape, ignoring that biases are dispositional tendencies that we can reduce if we remain aware of them, rather than surrendering control of our decisions and letting them become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
One way to combat it is to develop our intra- and interpersonal intelligence and try to find more reliable explanations that give rise to some behavior sequences that include environmental factors rather than just inferring the most convenient, self-satisfying attributions.
It’s also time to increase our awareness of the environment by recognizing the external forces that we don’t mediate, but that benefit us, the people whose actions have been instrumental in achieving our goals, giving them more gratitude, and distancing ourselves from the my-effort-my-success dyad. A possible way to balance things might be that the higher you are in the economic distribution, the more attention you should pay to your environment and its benefits.
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