Meritocracies aspire to reward hard work and promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances into which they were born. However, circumstances often shape the choice to work hard. I show that people’s merit judgments are “shallow” and insensitive to this effect. They hold others responsible for their choices, even if these choices have been shaped by unequal circumstances. In an experiment, U.S. participants judge how much money workers deserve for the effort they exert. Unequal circumstances disadvantage some workers and discourage them from working hard. Nonetheless, participants reward the effort of disadvantaged and advantaged workers identically, regardless of the circumstances under which choices are made. For some participants, this reflects their fundamental view regarding fair rewards. For others, the neglect results from the uncertain counterfactual. They understand that circumstances shape choices but do not correct for this because the counterfactual—what would have happened under equal circumstances—remains uncertain.

We study people’s subjective models of the macroeconomy and shed light on their attentional foundations. To do so, we measure beliefs about the effects of macroeconomic shocks on unemployment and inflation, providing respondents with identical information about the parameters of the shocks and previous realizations of macroeconomic variables. Within samples of 6, 500 US households and 1, 500 experts, beliefs are widely dispersed, even about the directional effects of shocks, and there are large differences in average beliefs between households and experts. Part of this disagreement seems to arise because respondents think of different propagation channels of the shocks, in particular demand- vs. supply-side mechanisms. We provide evidence on the role of associative memory in driving heterogeneity in thoughts and forecasts: contextual cues and prior experiences shape which propagation channels individuals retrieve and thereby which forecasts they make. Our findings offer a new perspective on the widely documented disagreement in macroeconomic expectations.