Meritocratic Narratives and Aporophobia: Unintended Consequences for Deservingness and Exclusionary Outcomes

Meritocratic ideals claim that economic outcomes should reflect effort and talent rather than luck or inherited advantage. This paper argues that such narratives create a neglected externality: by emphasizing individual effort and downplaying structural constraints, they shift poverty explanations toward personal blame and fuel aporophobia—aversion toward the poor—and related exclusionary attitudes. A conceptual framework links aporophobia to contractualist ideas of reciprocity and social membership, and a simple belief‑formation model formalizes the mechanism. Using cross‑country data from the World Values Survey and a U.S. experiment, the study shows that stronger meritocratic beliefs correlate with attributing poverty to laziness and with harsher attitudes toward immigrants. A luck‑focused informational prime produces varied behavioral responses in a dictator game and interacts with meritocratic beliefs in shaping sensitivity to need. The findings underscore how narratives shape deservingness and suggest that reducing poverty requires challenging the normative assumptions embedded in meritocratic framings.