From meritocracy to quiet quitting
How the notion of meritocracy is being challenged by the cost-of-living crisis
Barak Obama was fond of the line “You can make it if you try” using it in speeches and public statements more than 140 times. The notion that we deserve our success based on our own merit whether it be hard work or the skills we have got is one that sits deep in Western cultures. The term used to describe this is ‘meritocracy’, as embodied in stories such as the American Dream, the notion that whoever we are, whatever the circumstances of our upbringing, we can all achieve success.
But to what extent does the notion of meritocracy square with the cost-of-living crisis? It becomes harder to assert that we can all achieve success when the impact of the cost of living means that the simple acts of heating, cooking, eating and travel are quickly becoming problematic for millions of people in the UK and of course globally. Does this mean that the notion of meritocracy, which as people such as Michael Sandel point out has been so embedded in many cultures, is now being reconsidered?
Exploring this tells us something important about our relationship with the way that we engage with the concepts that shape our lives. And specifically, we can see more clearly how we come to consider that the concept of meritocracy as ‘just how life is’ has led to it shaping how we live, work and imagine our futures. Psychology and the social sciences more broadly have a key role to play here in helping us to unpack what is going on. But also, and critically, what their role has been in propagating this narrative and with that in mind how do we need to rethink this moving forwards?
How meritocracy sits deep in our sense of self
While meritocracy can be seen as means of social justice, a remedy to the notion that personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity or sexuality should be a barrier to our progress in the world. But this worthy notion is all too often inverted to suggest that success is a reflection of our virtue, that we deserve the rewards that have accrued. And related to that, the reverse is that failure must also be our own fault – assuming that people have had equal opportunity then people get what they ‘deserve’.
Meritocracy plays out in perhaps all too predictable ways. Research indicates that people belonging to more privileged socioeconomic classes explain behaviours through the lens of character traits and abilities, often not taking into account the environment or circumstances of a person. While at the other end of the spectrum, Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington points to the psychological costs of poverty itself, which results in lower locus of control (believing in one’s own power) and poorer self-regulation (ability to stick to long-term plans).
This reflects the work of Melvin Lerner whose just-world hypothesis suggests we have a tendency to assume events will have fair and fitting consequences for those involved. As such, we are inclined to particular patterns of causal attribution, assuming both victors and victims are inevitably in that position as a function of their own capabilities and application.
We can see how the pervasiveness of this belief has meant people easily internalised the notion of meritocracy. It also informs the way politics have developed in the last few decades, with ever increasing demands of personal responsibility accompanying the reining in of the welfare state and placing more onus on individuals in many domains (such as health, finance, training).
The role of psychology in shaping meritocracy
Just how did the belief of meritocracy gain such power over the way we live and think about ourselves? Given that the concept seeks to explain to us something about ‘how people behave’ then it is of little surprise that psychology has had an important role.
In an interesting paper Francesca Trevisan explored the way that psychology in fact perpetuated the notion of meritocracy, with IQ used to infer the psychological basis of societal differences. She sets out how this link was made explicitly in the 1970s by Richard Herrnstein, a right-wing Harvard psychologist. He asserted that IQ predicts success on the basis that a high IQ is a prerequisite for high-status occupations. While this argument was dismantled by other researchers in the subsequent decades, people such as Angela Saini have pointed out how this type of bad science has far from disappeared.
Trevisan suggests that much of the focus in research on meritocracy has moved onto a more nuanced position concerning the way in which psychology examined attitudes relating to the concept. From 2000 onwards, meritocracy was widely researched based on its association with a range of constructs such as race, white privilege, class privilege, gender, political orientation, emotions and social class. To study meritocracy’s relationship to these constructs, psychologists measured it with a variety of attitude related scales, tapping into different nuances of ‘merit.’ Some authors routinely drew on the ‘merit principle scale’ while others broke meritocracy down into different beliefs such as the belief that the world is just, the belief that success is linked to hard work.
This, argues Trevisan, resulted in a subtle shift, with these measurements further contributing to the notion that meritocracy is a phenomenon that is measurable and an inevitable part of the world. There is a sleight of hand that goes on, where if we are measuring our attitudes towards something, then we are examining our individual choice of how we choose to interpret a world that is fixed in nature. Conversely, if we saw meritocracy less as a fixed thing that we may have attitudes towards and more of an ideology, then we are more likely to see is as contested ground and as such open to political negotiation.
This is a subtle but important point because the emphasis on measurement of attitudes meant that the focus was moved away from the value-laden origins of meritocracy. As Trevisan pointed out in conversation, “Psychologists seek to measure, but the way we measure can itself be responsible for creating it.”
In other words, it seems that psychology had a role in moving meritocracy from a contested ideology to something that reflected an inevitable structure of ‘how things are.’
The challenge today
Bringing this to the challenges we are facing today, a recent blog post by writer Noah Smith sets out the case that many people have been living in a world of rising expectations. And as he points out, expectations matter. If the trend goes on long enough, we can assume that there is some sort of structural process underlying the trend, and therefore we assume the trend will continue indefinitely. As he puts it:
“For upwardly mobile people, or people in an economy that’s growing rapidly, or people whose stocks or houses are appreciating steadily in value, good times might come to seem normal.”
Linking this to meritocracy, we can fail to attribute our success to the rising tide of economic fortune (which is outside of our control) and instead attribute this to our individual skills and hard work.
Smith cites the Tocqueville paradox, which suggests that as social conditions and opportunities improve, social frustration grows more quickly. This is due to the notion that social reforms, rising living standards and increased careers opportunities can raise expectations that can't then be matched. While his paper deserves to be read in full, one of his conclusions is that we are suffering from an ‘elite over supply’ of people that are not able to find the type of work that is intellectually rewarding or socially prestigious careers. Aligning with Alexis de Tocqueville who based his observation in part on the French Revolution, he suggests that:
“…a society that generates a large cohort of restless, frustrated, talented, highly educated young people is asking for trouble.”
On this basis then, not unreasonably, young people think that by investing in their future and working hard then they should be able to enjoy the fruits of their labour in the workplace. To not be able to do so surely seems perplexing and disappointing in the logic and ‘justness’ of a meritocratic society. Has the internalisation of the meritocratic ideology led people to be severely disappointed by the harsh reality of the world we are now in?
Using psychology to explore this hypothesis
To assess the veracity of this claim we can use psychology: after all, the notion of ‘elite over supply’ infers psychological mechanisms as it suggests people will be making comparisons with other people and the past. Sure enough, the notion does find support from psychology: Temporal Self Appraisal Theory and Social Comparison Theory demonstrate that our cognitive processes are not based on absolutes but are instead based on comparisons being made between what is expected, a ‘reference point,’ and what is experienced either to our past or future selves or with reference to other people around us. When an experience deviates from these expectations, it calls our attention – for good or bad.
This leads us to Relative Deprivation Theory which states that when people compare themselves to others, and if when doing so, find themselves disadvantaged, then they are likely to feel anger and frustration (see work by Seamus Power here and here). This is a perfectly reasonable explanation (and indeed one we have deployed previously.)
Arguably, however, whilst this seems like a reasonable hypothesis, is there a danger that we are remaining within the meritocratic belief system, as we assume people are all making comparisons using the same standard, wanting the same things. This notion is something at the core of meritocracy, that we can all be evaluated on the same ‘merit scale’ and be met with a set of successes or failures that we all identify in the same way.
With that in mind, an alternative but surely equally plausible explanation of what we are seeing is that people are simply re-framing what they want: what some consider to be merit, successes, or failures, others may not. When Smith suggests that people with college degrees were not as happy at work than their less-qualified peers despite making more money, it does not necessarily mean that they are ‘frustrated’ but perhaps they simply have a different set of expectations about what work will offer. In fact during COVID there is some evidence that swathes of the population are reconsidering what a good life entails, with much discussion through themes such as ‘The Great Resignation’ and ‘Quiet quitting’.
Perhaps there is instead a huge reassessment of the degree of identification and ‘self-actualisation’ through paid employment. What might appear to be frustration may in fact be refusal to play by the same rules. As such perhaps the focus for behavioural scientists then needs to move from the way people make relative comparisons to instead examining how people go about determining what living well looks like.
The point is that if we are not careful, we can easily slip into an analysis of behaviour that is in itself shaped by belief systems we are trying to understand. And it is only by reflecting on these underlying values and the way they may be influencing our work can we start to consider alternative explanations.
In conclusion
Through this discussion we can see the way that psychology has a tangled relationship with ideology: Trevisan has identified the course of events by which psychology has both explicitly (via IQ measurement) and (arguable) inadvertently (via a focus on attitudes) supported the essentialisation of what is really a political position. It can be tempting to assume these are the mistakes of the past but as we saw in the last section, in our everyday work when we explanations for behaviours we can draw on bodies of knowledge that may well assume a particular set of values and beliefs.
With this in mind, perhaps we need to recognise that as social scientists some of issues that we are engaged in need to have their political dimension more explicitly recognised. Trevisan cites Gordon Allport:
“the modern social psychologist . . . needs an ability to relate the problem to the context in which it properly belongs. Sometimes the context lies in the tradition of academic psychology, … frequently in the political life of our days.”
This suggests we need to challenge ourselves about the extent to which some of the things we explore should be scrutinised for their ideological framing. We surely need to be self-reflective at this moment of fragility and transition, if we want to psychology and the social sciences to offer much needed alternative perspectives and explanations of behaviour.