How the Reification of Merit Breeds Inequality: Theory and Experimental Evidence

• In Event: 3231 - Open Session for Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility

Abstract

In a variety of social contexts, measuring merit or performance is a crucial step toward enforcing meritocratic ideals. At the same time, workable measures – such as ratings – are bound to obfuscate the intricacy inherent to any empirical occurrence of merit, and thus to reify it into a seemingly crisp and clear-cut thing. This article explores how the reification of employee merit in organizations breeds inequality in employee compensation. It reports the findings of a large-scale experiment asking participants to divide a year-end bonus among a set of employees based on the reading of their annual performance reviews. In the experiment’s non-reified condition, reviews are narrative evaluations. In the reified condition, the same narrative evaluations are accompanied by a crisp rating of the employees’ performance. We show that participants reward employees more unequally when performance is reified, even though employees’ levels of reported performance do not vary across conditions. Further analyses suggest that reification breeds inequality both by reinforcing the authoritativeness of evaluation and by making observers more accepting of the idea that the evaluated can be meaningfully sorted into a merit hierarchy. This has direct implications for understanding the rise of legitimate inequality in societies characterized by the proliferation of reifying forms of merit evaluation.

Authors

• Fabien Accominotti, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Daniel Tadmon, Columbia University