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ICS

W

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2017

higher levels of prejudice in the meritocracy condition as hypothesized,

B

= 89.5;

F

= 3.02;

t

(34)

= 1.74;

p

< .09.

Figure 2

illustrates levels of prejudice at Time 1 and Time 2 and the

variations between those two periods.

Discussion

Results from this second study offer further support to the idea that priming meritocracy

increases implicit prejudice. In fact, besides showing higher levels of implicit prejudice at Time

2 for the individuals in the Meritocracy condition, results indicated that only in this condition

was there a significant

increase

of individuals’ level of implicit prejudice. It is noteworthy that

these significant variations of implicit prejudice took place even though the Affective Priming

Task was administered twice which might have motivated participants to try to reproduce

their response pattern from Time 1.

General Discussion

Taken together, these two studies constitute an initial step to expand our knowledge

about the effects of the prevalence of a meritocratic norm on individuals’ attitudes and

behaviors within a society where such norm is constantly and subtly primed. This research

shows that the activation of a meritocratic norm facilitates the expression of implicit prejudice.

One could argue that what triggered the expression of implicit prejudice was the mere

reference to groups that was present in the meritocracy condition and absent from the neutral

condition. However, it should be mentioned that in Study 2 there is hardly any reference to

groups in the experimental sentences included in the Scrambled Sentence Task in the

Meritocracy condition. Moreover, previous studies used manipulations (of equality) with

references to groups that, on the contrary, caused a decrease of implicit favoritism

(Zogmaister et al, 2008).

Two additional steps that should be addressed in future studies would complement on

two limitations of the current preliminary research: 1) the identification of the underlying

mechanism and 2) the analysis of the impact of meritocracy on actual behavior. Regarding the

mechanism through which this facilitation occurs, we find it unlikely that a process of

justification is taking place here. Justification seems to be a valid explanation in the case of

more reflective processes (Stack & Deutsch, 2004; Pereira, Vala & Leyens, 2009), which would

be in line with the

Justification Supression Model

(JSM; Crandall & Eshleman, 2003). In fact,

according to JSM, people carry both a genuine prejudice and a need to act in a non-prejudiced

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