Lucky But Confident — How Confidence Can Polarize Meritocratic Beliefs and Preferences for Redistribution

How does the experience of success in combination with confidence affect meritocratic beliefs and preferences for redistribution? In a large-scale experiment, we manipulate both the level of confidence in own performance and the outcome of a competition to provide causal evidence. First, we document that increased confidence has a polarizing effect on meritocratic beliefs: Whereas we find no difference in beliefs between winners and losers in a low confidence treatment, increasing the level of confidence causes winners to believe that the competition is more likely to be determined by merit compared to losers. Furthermore, we find that confidence has no causal effect on preferences for redistribution. However, we do find that winning the competition significantly reduces the willingness to redistribute, regardless of confidence treatment. Our findings suggest that disagreements about the causes of inequality are most likely to occur among people who expect to succeed given a meritocratic process, but also that the disparities in beliefs have a limited causal impact on their preferences for the allocation of earnings