ICS Working Papers Nº1/2017

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2017
and that we should compensate individuals and groups on the basis of their effort. Moreover,
it was explicitly said that a society that does not value these ideas would have serious
problems to develop. In the neutral condition, participants read a text about a Dutch
supermarket franchise, its history and basic information about the number of branches and
functioning hours.
Implicit prejudice. As mentioned above, we were interested in observing the effects
of priming meritocracy on implicit prejudice, by considering how meritocracy affects
accessibility of negative implicit associations with a certain low status- outgroup. Given this
emphasis on the outgroup independently from the ingroup, we decided to use a Single-Target
IAT in which the only target group present in the task is the outgroup of interest, in this case
Moroccans. Participants were asked to classify Moroccan names (e.g. Achmed, Mustafa) and
positive and negative words (e.g., love, peace, war, pain) with two response keys (left and
right) in a congruent and an incongruent block. The congruent block consisted of classifying 10
Moroccan names and 10 negative words with the left key, and 20 positive words with the right
key. The incongruent block consisted of classifying 10 Moroccan names and 10 positive words
with the right key, and 20 negative words with the left key.
Results
To obtain a measure of implicit prejudice, we calculated our measure of association
strength analogous to Greenwald and colleagues (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). The
first two trials of each block were excluded from analysis. Latencies were capped to a range of
300 ms to 3000 ms. Analyzes were performed on log-transformed latencies, but the latencies
reported are the untransformed (in milliseconds). Implicit prejudice consists of the difference
between latencies in the incongruent block and the congruent block. We subjected these
scores of implicit prejudice to a one-way (Meritocracy vs. Neutral) ANOVA. Results indicate
higher levels of implicit prejudice towards Moroccans in the condition where the meritocratic
norm was made salient (M = 52.8, SD = 71.4) comparing to a neutral condition (M = 13.9, SD =
55.8), F (1, 40) = 4.78; p <.05, η = .11 (see Figure 1 ).
Discussion
This experiment offered first support to the idea that priming meritocracy leads to
higher levels of implicit prejudice. To offer further support to this hypothesis, with Study 2 we
aimed to replicate these results with a different manipulation of meritocracy and a different
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