Survey participants were asked to assign importance to various criteria, including grades, in university admissions. Merit scored well among white participants. But…
When asked about “leadership” as an admissions criterion, white ranking of the measure went up in importance when respondents were informed of the Asian success in University of California admissions.
“Sociologists have found that whites refer to ‘qualifications’ and a meritocratic distribution of opportunities and rewards, and the purported failure of blacks to live up to this meritocratic standard, to bolster the belief that racial inequality in the United States has some legitimacy,” Samson writes in the paper. “However, the results here suggest that the importance of meritocratic criteria for whites varies depending upon certain circumstances. To wit, white Californians do not hold a principled commitment to a fixed standard of merit.”