Random role assignment alone leads people to infer ability differences that justify those roles.

Evidence

A number of studies have demonstrated that people will ascribe traits to themselves as well as other people in such a way that the status or role that they occupy is justified. For example, in a singularly important demonstration, Ross et al. (1977) showed the ease with which a social situation creates justification for beliefs about the self and others. The researchers randomly assigned subjects to play either the role of contestant or questioner in a variant of the game of “Jeopardy,” which tests players’ aptitude for general knowledge. Results were that people attributed greater knowledge to questioners than contestants simply because the latter were in a far more challenging position, despite the fact that assignment to these roles was explicitly random, and that any differences that emerged were due purely to the position subjects found themselves occupying. These false attributions persisted even when subjects judged their own abilities: people judged themselves to be less knowledgeable when they were assigned to the contestant role than when they were assigned to the questioner role. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2923

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the Jeopardy experiment as a precise model of how hierarchies convince the powerless of the powerful’s genuine superiority — applicable to workplaces, castes, and academia alike.