Meritocracy doesn't exist, and believing it does is bad for you

This is one of those counter-intuitive revelations. When I read Thinking Fast and Slow it was filled with this kind of stuff.

… a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways.

Totally the opposite of what one would desire to happen.

They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value.

That is surprising.