Çoban, Esra (2022) The effect of status threat on outgroup attitudes of the higher educated towards the lower educated when the existence of a meritocracy is doubted. Bachelor thesis, Psychology.
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Abstract
Education produces and reproduces status. Though educational success underlies structural factors like family background and wealth, educational institutions in modern Western societies function by means of meritocracy, consisting of hard work and talent attributions. Dominant individuals have an interest in upholding their high-status position and participate in legitimization and reinforcement processes that uphold unequal power and resource distribution in the face of threat. The present research investigates whether threatening the status of the higher educated affects outgroup attitudes towards the less educated when doubt is put on meritocracy. A sample of 192 higher educated people was allocated into the three conditions control, hard work, and talent. The hard work condition was confronted with a delegitimization of the perseverance domain of meritocracy, while the talent condition received a delegitimization of talent in the importance of educational success. Our analyses revealed that 1) hard work is the more – and in some cases, only – salient structure in meritocracy beliefs, 2) discriminatory outgroup behaviors decrease substantially when the influence of hard work on educational success is doubted, 3) paternalistic behaviors decrease as meritocracy is delegitimized, and 4) higher educational identification increases negative attitudes towards the less educated. Keywords: Meritocracy, Education-based discrimination, Educationism, Social Identity Theory, Status threat
| Item Type: | Thesis (Bachelor) |
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| Supervisor name: | Noord, J.J.L. van and Spears, R. |
| Degree programme: | Psychology |
| Differentiation route: | Other [Bachelor Psychology] |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Mar 2022 13:39 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Mar 2022 13:39 |
| URI: | http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/291 |
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