Von der Meritokratie zur Parentokratie?

In 1990, the English educational sociologist Phillip Brown argued that the age of meritocracy had been replaced by a mode of allocating life chances following an “ideology of parentocracy”. In a parentocracy, parents’ wishes and resources are decisive for the allocation of life chances of individual pupils. This proposition was taken up many times in the following years. The article argues against the parentocracy proposition and argues that meritocracy has not become weaker as a legitimatory norm of the allocation of life chances and social inequality. However, on the level of the actual operation of the educational system and its interaction with its environment, parentocracy does play a role. This is discussed using on the one hand the way in which Eton College presents itself to its environment and on the other hand how it actually recruits pupils. The article discusses this using a neoinstitutionalist theoretical frame. Finally, the article discusses the ambivalent role of performance data within the uneasy relationship of meritocracy and parentocracy.     

Human handedness in interactive situations: Negative perceptual frequency effects can be reversed!

Abstract

Left-handed performers seem to enjoy an advantage in interactive sports. Researchers suggest this is predominantly due to the relative scarcity of left-handers compared with right-handers. Such negative frequency-dependent advantages are likely to appear in inefficient game-play behaviour against left-handed opponents such as reduced ability to correctly anticipate left-handers' action intentions. We used a pre–post retention design to test whether such negative frequency-dependent perceptual effects can be reversed via effective training. In a video-based test, 30 handball novices anticipated the shot outcome of temporally occluded handball penalties thrown by right- and left-handed players. Between the pre- and post-tests, participants underwent a perceptual training programme to improve prediction accuracy, followed by an unfilled retention test one week later. Participants were divided into two hand-specific training groups (i.e. only right- or left-handed shots were presented during training) and a mixed group (i.e. both right- and left-handed shots were presented). Our results support the negative frequency-dependent advantage hypothesis, as hand-specific perceptual training led to side-specific improvement of anticipation skills. Similarly, findings provide experimental evidence to support the contention that negatively frequency-dependent selection mechanisms contributed to the maintenance of the handedness polymorphism.     

Family background variables as instruments for education in income regressions: A Bayesian analysis

The validity of family background variables instrumenting education in income regressions has been much criticized. In this paper, we use data from the 2004 German Socio-Economic Panel and Bayesian analysis to analyze to what degree violations of the strict validity assumption affect the estimation results. We show that, in case of moderate direct effects of the instrument on the dependent variable, the results do not deviate much from the benchmark case of no such effect (perfect validity of the instrument's exclusion restriction). In many cases, the size of the bias is smaller than the width of the 95% posterior interval for the effect of education on income. Thus, a violation of the strict validity assumption does not necessarily lead to results which are strongly different from those of the strict validity case. This finding provides confidence in the use of family background variables as instruments in income regressions.