The goal of the project is to conduct correlational and experimental studies that study the impact of a meritocratic norm on legal decisions towards low status group members, using samples of both lay people and legal workers (such as soon-to-be judges and social workers working in the prison system). The project brings together a team of academics with a strong expertise in intergroup relations and socially critical decisions and is able to count with the essential collaboration with people from the legal system who have already agreed to take part in the project. People face trivial decisions everyday but every once in a while people face decisions with a deep impact on others as they may imply serious harm or unequal distribution of relevant material or symbolic resources. Legal decisions i.e. formal decisions regarding punishment for alleged illegal behaviors are a paradigmatic example of these socially critical decisions (SCD). These legal decisions constitute the core of this project and its main goal is to study whether and how the contextual salience of a meritocratic norm impacts on legal decisions towards low status group members. Research on SCD within asymmetric social relations has focused on different examples such as ?shoot vs. not-shoot? police decisions as a function of different ethnic target groups, medical decisions, moral dilemmas and legal decisions. A consistent result across these different decisional contexts indicates that low status group members (e.g. blacks, gipsies, homeless) are targeted with more unfavorable decisions. For example, looking in particular to legal decisions, a meta-analysis unequivocally demonstrated the existence of racial bias in studies addressing juror decision-making, where other-race defendants are generally targeted with more negative decisions [19]. However, research has been more focused in showing this group-based discrimination in SCD than in explaining it. Importantly, a significant factor that has been consistently shown to impact on group-based distinctions has been neglected by SCD research: that is, the salience of a meritocratic norm. Although seen as an important social norm that regulates society, descriptive meritocracy, i.e. the belief that people are rewarded based on their efforts) is however associated with intolerance and dislike of members of low status groups and may therefore be logically associated with more unfavorable decisions towards low status groups. The potential reason for that may be that when meritocratic beliefs are salient, low status individuals are not seen as victims of a discriminatory system, but as responsible for their own negative situation. Thus, meritocracy may lead to an enhanced status legitimacy perception and this perceived legitimacy may facilitate more negative decisions towards these groups. Nonetheless, to our knowledge, the impact of meritocracy has never been studied within the research on legal decisions.