What's hard work got to do with it? Diversity course impact on meritocracy beliefs and dialogue about race

Objectives: Diversity courses aim to help students navigate a pluralistic society, and meritocracy beliefs are thought to be central to this effort. The purpose of this study was thus to explore the impact of diversity course enrollment on both meritocracy beliefs and interracial dialogue attitudes. Methods: Both at the beginning and end of the semester, quantitative survey data were collected from 435 student respondents: 274 were enrolled in one of two non-diversity courses, 147 participated in one section of an Intercultural Communication course, and 14 were cross-enrolled. The survey included measures of prescriptive and descriptive meritocracy, as well as two measures of dialogue assessed in relation to testimonies of social suffering provided by two African-American students: speaker trust and imagined dialogue receptivity. Results: Data confirmed that, among racial outgroup participants, descriptive and prescriptive meritocracy are connected to racial dialogue measures in antagonistic ways. In addition, the diversity class succeeded in decreasing student beliefs in descriptive meritocracy, increasing meritocracy discrepancy, expanding speaker trust, and engendering greater dialogue receptivity relative to the control classes. Lastly, changes in both meritocracy discrepancy and diversity course enrollment independently predicted changes in the racial dialogue measures. Conclusion: Meritocracy is a multidimensional, ideological belief that appears linked to racial dialogue engagement in its prescriptive form and avoidance in its descriptive form. Findings underscore the need to distinguish between these forms of meritocracy, encourage the use of meritocracy discrepancy scores, and confirm the promise of diversity course enrollment.