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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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