A Cornell experiment ties resentment over a training decision to how the work was assigned

The quiz was built so the researchers could manufacture a performance gap and know exactly where it came from. Participants answered twelve questions on popular idioms. In one version eight were in German, a language only a few of them could understand, which left four in English ^[4][21]. Whoever sat that version scored badly for a reason the experimenters controlled. The award the manager could then hand out was help with the German idioms before a second quiz ^[6].

Inside the task, then, the efficiency argument is literally true: the coaching targets the material that caused the gap. It is also the argument Wiernsperger says managers make. "The dollar spent on improving their performance typically goes further than somebody who is already doing a good job," he said ^[14].

The question came from complaints the authors heard at home. Wiernsperger and Mackenzie Feinberg, then graduate students, both had relatives in health care who said it was the weaker staff who got sent to training ^[15]. "It seemed like it was always those who performed badly who got selected by the head nurse or by the manager to go to those trainings," Wiernsperger said. "And this creates a fairness dilemma, both for the manager who makes this decision and for the employees who react to this." ^[12][13]

The cells are small. 186 people in threes is 62 groups, so 62 managers and 124 employees ^[19]. Split across the two norm conditions, that is 62 employees each; divide a condition again by whether a person was the higher or lower scorer and whether the manager trained them, and four cells average about 15 people if managers spread their picks evenly ^[20]. They were under no obligation to. The phys.org account gives the direction of each result without effect sizes or condition-level counts ^[22].

After the second quiz, participants were given a low-skill task that benefited the manager and not themselves, and their engagement with it stood in for their reaction to the training decision ^[8]. They had been working under a winner-take-all contract, where the better scorer on each quiz took a large prize and the runner-up got nothing ^[7]. Turnover, durable skill gain, and whether the resentment outlived the session are outside this design.

Both halves of the result follow from what each employee thought was owed. Under random assignment nobody had earned their score, so the lower performer treated the coaching as due, was less enthusiastic on receiving it, and felt more slighted than their meritocratic counterpart on losing it ^[9][10]. Under choice, the higher performer's score was the product of a decision that worked, and it was the passed-over higher performer who reacted more negatively ^[11].

Because only a few participants understood German, the choice on offer in the meritocratic arm was mostly a choice of difficulty ^[4][5]. The higher performers in that condition earned their standing by picking the easier quiz.