Luck Favors Those Who Show Merit

Abstract To manage the influx of diverse applicants and increase accountability, educational institutions have increasingly adopted high-stakes entrance exams. In response to intensified competition, recent US-based research suggests that growing belief in meritocracy leads “winners” to attribute success to hard work, feel morally superior to “losers,” and dismiss the role of luck. This study contributes to the broader understanding of the social-psychological impacts of meritocratic selection by drawing on qualitative longitudinal interviews with high school seniors at eighteen selective high schools in Japan, where college attendance is nearly universal. Follow-up interviews with graduates reveal that those who were not admitted to their first-choice universities tend to reject the idea that bad luck contributed to their failure, even though the admissions process contains unpredictable elements. Instead, they are more likely to attribute failure to insufficient effort—even in cases where their effort was substantial, and poor outcomes were largely due to chance. They then retrospectively rationalize their outcomes as appropriate or deserved. The article discusses the cultural and institutional factors that sustain strong support for effort-based meritocracy in Japan's high-stakes admissions system, and it considers the implications for inequality.