Psychological and computational evidence that merit is a constructed evaluative process

Merit is a foundational moral principle invoked to justify inequality between people, yet an individual’s productivity is shaped not only by their efforts but also their opportunities. How, then, do people construct merit judgements? Across four preregistered, incentivized studies with US-based samples (total N = 759), we provide psychological and computational evidence that merit is not the product of a fixed rule, but rather the outcome of a subjective valuation. In a two-stage paradigm, participants first completed a real-effort tournament that dissociated performance (effort) from structural productivity (output dependent on opportunity). Thereafter, groups of observers and stakeholders allocated resources to tournament players. Across studies, a player’s performance and structural productivity influenced how people judged deservingness. Computational modeling revealed that decision-makers integrated these dimensions of merit into a value computation that shaped allocations. Crucially, individuals differed in their latent weighting patterns, yielding subgroups with directly opposing conceptions of deservingness. By revealing merit as a nonuniform ideal, these findings provide a mechanistic account of how deservingness is determined, helping explain the compelling yet contested nature of meritocracy.