How does the context of income inequality in which people live affect their belief in meritocracy, the ability to get ahead through hard work? A prominent recent study by Newman, Johnston, and Lown argues that, consistent with the conflict theory, exposure to higher levels of local income inequality leads lower-income people to become more likely to rejectand higher-income people to become more likely to accept-the dominant United States ideology of meritocracy. Here, we show that this conclusion is not supported by the study's own reported results and that even these results depend on pooling three distinctly different measures of meritocracy into a single analysis. We then demonstrate that analysis of a larger and more representative survey employing a single consistent measure of the dependent variable yields the opposite conclusion. Consistent with the relative power theory, among those with lower incomes, local contexts of greater inequality are associated with more widespread belief that people can get ahead if they are willing to work hard.

Do contexts of greater income inequality spur the disadvantaged to achieve a class consciousness vital to contesting the fairness of the economic system and demanding more redistribution? One prominent recent study, Newman, Johnston, and Lown (2015), argues that simple exposure to higher levels of local income inequality lead low-income people to view the United States as divided into haves and have-nots and to see themselves as among the have-nots, that is, to become more likely to achieve such a class consciousness. Here, we show that this sanguine conclusion is at best supported only in analyses of the single survey presented in that study. There is no evidence that higher levels of income inequality produce greater class consciousness among those with low incomes in other similar but neglected surveys.