Implications of Age-based Stereotypes
Chapter 4 Age-based Stereotypes
Definition of Stereotypes
"We like to solve problems easily. We can do so best if we can fit them rapidly into a satisfactory category and use this category as a means of prejudging the solution… So long as we can get away with coarse overgeneralizations we tend to do so. Why? Well, it takes less effort, and effort, except in the area of our most intense interests, is disagreeable. (Allport, 1954, pp. 20-21).
"A stereotype is the sluggard's best friend" (Gilbert & Hixon, 1991, p. 509).
A stereotype is a generalization about a group of people in which identical characteristics are assigned to virtually all member of the group, regardless of actual variations among group members. Stereotyping involves an act of categorization where we look at a person and by virtue of an attribute, physical feature, or behavior we can assign that person to a group. Some basic features on which people stereotype others are age, race, and gender; however, there are probably an infinite number of categories in which we can stereotype someone. The use of stereotypes is pervasive. They can even be the basis of jokes as any of us who has had to suffer listening to lawyer, airline, and dumb blonde jokes knows all too well.
Stereotypes have been considered to be a byproduct of the natural tendency of human beings to categorize the world. We come to understand much of the world based on how objects in it are categorized. For example, we can tell the difference between a chair and a 1952 Buick. The chair shares features that are consistent with other members of its particular category (chair) or superordinate category (furniture) and the Buick exhibits features that are consistent with other members of its category (Buicks) and its superordinate category (automobiles). We tend to learn many of these categories early in life (such as chairs) and others we learn later (such as 1952 Buicks). In essence, categories make the world easier to understand.
A stereotype is an easy way to organize information using the least amount of effort. One way to look at a stereotype is that it is an energy saving device. This view of stereotypes emphasizes the metaphor of the person as a cognitive miser (Chapter 2). That is, we may not want to put in the effort necessary to understand that just because we place someone into a category does not mean that that person will act just like all the other members of that category.
Stereotypes can be positive or negative. For example, we could stereotype all older people as cranky or we could stereotype them as wise. The point is that when we stereotype someone we assume that they will talk, look, and act like all the other members of the category into which we put that person.
Stereotyping
someone
may be a natural process of organizing information about the world, but
I know that many of us have resented it when someone has applied a
stereotype
to us. Part of this negative reaction to being stereotyped, in part,
has
to do with other concepts that might occur along with the stereotype;
they
are prejudice and discrimination. Prejudice
refers to the negative and unjustifiable attitude someone has toward a
group of people. People are prejudiced when they do not like a group of
people because they believe this group possesses undesirable
characteristics
(e.g., lazy, shifty, dumb). Discrimination
is the behavior toward a group, such as not hiring someone because of a
person's gender, age, or ethnic background.
Evidence for Multiple Stereotypes of Aging
The study of stereotypes of aging has received a great deal of attention from researchers. Researchers believed for a long time that most of the stereotypes that people had of older adults were negative. These negative stereotypes could be reflected in prejudicial attitudes and discrimination toward older people (e.g., mandatory retirement, not hiring an older person).
Brewer, Dull,
and
Lui (1981), however, proposed that people do not typically think about
older people as a general category but instead organize information
about
older people into more meaningful subcategories. These researchers make
the distinction between stereotyping that occurs at a superordinate
level
of categorization (i.e., old people in general) and stereotyping that
occurs
at a more basic level of categorization (i.e., specific subtypes of
older
people). These researchers demonstrated that stereotyping occurs at a
more
basic level in which stereotypes about older people are organized into
specific subtypes.
Figure 1
(Figure 1 adapted from Brewer, Dull, Lui (1981).
As can be seen
in
Figure 1, when people think about an older person, they may think about
subtypes or subcategories such as grandmothers, elder statesmen, or
senior
citizens.
Further research in this area (Schmidt and Boland,1986), revealed that people use even more subcategories than previously thought. These subcategories can include negative and positive stereotypes about older people.
Figure 2
(Figure based on Schmidt & Boland, 1986).
This finding has implications for how we view older adults. Not only do we have multiple stereotypes of older people but also our attitudes toward older adults may differ depending upon the stereotype that is called to mind when we encounter an older individual.
Might our stereotypes of older adults become more complex as we get older? Although people indeed think about different stereotypes of older people is it the case that the number and complexity of stereotypes that people have may differ depending upon the persons age? Hummert, Garstka, Shaner, & Strahm (1994) tested the hypothesis that younger people may have less complex stereotypes of older adults than do older people. In their research, they had younger, middle-aged, and older participants look at a number of traits such as family oriented, poor, happy, miserable, alert, gray hair. The participants were asked to look at the traits and were instructed to sort the traits into groups by putting the traits which would be found in the same elderly person into one pile and traits that would describe a different elderly person into another pile, and so on.
Table 1
The Number of Groups into
which
Younger, Middle-aged, and Older Participants Sorted Traits
| Younger Participants (ages 18-22) | Middle-aged
Participants
(ages 35-51) |
Older Participants (ages 60-85) |
| 6.98 groups | 6.28 groups | 8.28 groups |
This table represents the number of groups into which the participants sorted the traits. As can be seen, the number of groups differed with participant age. Older participants came up with more groups than did both middle-aged and younger participants. This difference was statistically significant between the older and middle-aged participants but only marginally significant between the older and younger participants. The younger and middle-aged participants did not differ in the number of groups.
The difference in the number of groups generated by the younger, middle-aged, and older participants can be explained by ingroup/outgroup differences. An ingroup is the group that you identify yourself as being a member of. For example, a young person would identify him or herself as a member of young people and not of old people. An outgroup is the group that you are not part of. We tend to perceive members of our own group as not being all alike, however, we tend to perceive members of an outgroup as being very much alike in character and behavior. How ingroup/outgroup effects explain this finding is that when older people think about other older people--their ingroup--they tend to think about the diversity of the members (i.e., "we are not all alike, there are many different types of old people") and therefore create more categories. On the other hand, younger people perceive older people as an outgroup and thus create fewer categories because to them older people are perceived to look, act, and behave more alike than to look, act, and behave differently.
Implications of Age-based Stereotypes
Illusory Correlations
When we stereotype people we are actually forming a correlation between a particular member of some group and that person's behavior or character. We must be aware that these relationships may be false or illusory. Illusory correlations occur when we perceive a relationship between two events (e.g., older person and a behavior) that does not actually exist or does exist but to a lesser extent than we believe (Chapman, 1967). We can stereotype people along many dimensions. For example, we can stereotype people based on hair color (red hair, blondes), occupation, organizations they belong to (fraternities or sororities), cars they drive, ethnicity, gender, and age. The list is endless. What we are basically doing is creating relationships between one variable of the person (e.g., hair color) and another variable (their behavior). These relationships (or stereotypes) may come from our own experience, or from society or our culture. One concern with using stereotypes is that once we view a person or group in a certain way it is hard to recognize or appreciate information that goes against the stereotype. That takes more effort. Here's how it works:
Suppose you have a negative stereotype of older people and a more
positive
stereotype of younger people. Lets further suppose that you are the
kind
of person that can keep track of all the instances where you noticed
the
behavior of older people and the behavior of younger people (Good luck,
we are not very good at keeping track of information like this in our
heads).
You examine the behavior of 20 people some of whom are old and some of
whom are young. After doing so, you create a list that looks like this:
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Looking at this table, what do you notice? Perhaps you noticed that it
seems that older people are nastier than younger people. Another way to
look at your data is to create a table that looks like this:
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Now your suspicions might be confirmed after looking at this table
because
it certainly looks as if there are more nasty older people than nasty
younger
people. If you used the upper left cell of the table to influence your
judgment then you are doing something called a confirmation bias.
A confirmation
bias occurs when people pay attention to information that
confirms
their beliefs, theories, and in this case stereotypes but fail to look
at the disconfirming information. Not only must we look at the cases
where
our beliefs are confirmed but also at the cases where our beliefs are
disconfirmed.
This requires that we utilize all of the information on this table. How
do we do that? The best way is to look at the proportion of older and
younger
adults who perform each behavior and compare those proportions to each
other. If we do that we get a table that looks like this:
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Now what do you see? If we look at the proportions we find that .75 (or 75%) of the older folks we sampled and .75 (75%) of the younger folks we sampled were not very nice. We could conclude that in our sample we found no differences between being nasty or nice and whether the person was young or old. Thus, our initial belief was based on an illusory correlation.
Age-based stereotypes may also affect what we remember about our selves in the past and also affect our own performance particularly if we believe that there is a relationship between old age and certain traits.
Memory for Traits in the Past
An interesting study by McFarland, Ross, & Giltrow (1992) investigated how older adults recall the traits they possessed at an earlier age. This study was based on the idea that people have beliefs about aging, or implicit theories of aging, in that people believe that some characteristics increase and some decrease with age. Two groups of older adults were used in this research. One group assessed a list of traits and indicated whether these traits increase or decrease with age. Some of the traits that the participants believed increased with age were leadership ability, understanding, affectionate, relaxed, worry about chest pains, and degree of physical discomfort. Some of the traits participants believed decreased with age were being shy, being active, ability to remember a name or phone number right after hearing it, and the importance of being attractive.
A second group of older adults were given this list and asked to think back to when they were 38 years old and to assess how much of that trait they possessed at that age. The recollections reflected implicit stereotypes of aging. People recalled themselves as possessing less of the traits that increase with age and more of the traits that decrease with age when they were 38 compared to now.
Performance on Memory Tests
One belief that makes up our implicit stereotypes of aging is that memory will decline as we get older (recall this was one item in the McFarland et al (1992) study that people believe decline with age). Levy and Langer (1994) proposed that this belief can affect how we perform on memory tests.
At this point, please re-read the
Levy
and Langer (1994) article.
Improving Memory
Not only do our implicit theories of aging negatively affect memory performance but also these implicit beliefs might be used to improve performance. Levy (1996) presented to people subliminal messages that either activated a negative stereotype of aging (e.g., can't recall birth date; senility) or activated a positive stereotype of aging (e.g., sees all sides of an issue; wise). The participants were older adults ranging in age from 60 to 90 years and were given a number of memory tests. Participants who received the positive stereotype of aging performed better on the memory tests than participants who received the negative stereotype of aging. The researcher offers a pessimistic and optimistic message. The pessimistic message is that if one holds the belief that memory decline is inevitable in old age this belief may create a self-fulfilling prophecy in that memory will, indeed, decline. However the optimistic message is that memory can be enhanced in old age if we think about positive stereotypes of aging. Levy suggests that it may be most beneficial to make people aware of the positive and the negative views of aging.
Bargh, Chen,
and
Burrows (1996) investigated the behavioral effects of activating an
elderly
stereotype. In this study (Experiment 2) one group of undergraduates
were
primed (a methodological procedure that activates a stereotype without
the participant's awareness) with an elderly stereotype and another
group
were not primed with an elderly stereotype. Participants were measured
in how fast they walked down the hallway when leaving the experiment.
Participants
who were primed with the elderly stereotype walked more slowly compared
to participants who were not primed with the elderly stereotype. Along
with this study and those by Levy and Langer (1994) and Levy (1996) the
activation of a stereotype about aging particularly if it is negative
may
result in a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is people, will think and
behave
in ways that are consistent with the stereotype.
Reference
Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. New York, NY: Addison Wesley.
Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230-244.
Brewer, M. B., Dull, V., & Lui, L. (1981). Perceptions of the elderly: Stereotypes as prototypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41, 656-670.
Chapman, L. J. (1967). Illusory correlation in observational report. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 6, 151-155.
Gilbert, D. T. & Hixon, J. G. (1991). The trouble of thinking: Activation and application of stereotypic beliefs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 509-517.
Hummert, M. L., Garstka, T. A., Shaner, J. L., & Strahm, S. (1994). Stereotypes of the elderly held by young, middle-aged, and elderly adults. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 49, 240-249.
Levy, B. (1996). Improving memory in old age through implicit self-stereotyping. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 1092-1107.
McFarland, C., Ross, M., & Giltrow, M. (1992). Biased recollections in older adults: The role of implicit theories of aging. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 837-850.
Schmidt, D.
F.,
& Boland, S. M. (1986). Structure of perceptions of older adults:
Evidence
for multiple stereotypes. Psychology and Aging, 1, 255-260.
HELPFUL LINKS
What I am looking for
in Stereotype writing assignment (see course calendar) is that
you have explored other sources about
stereotypes other than the information provided in the Levy and Langer
reading and in the Echapter and have integrated these sources in your
answer.
One helpful start would be to do a google search. I
used the search term social psychology and aging and found some
interesting stuff. For example:
I found an interesting link that should be helpful as addition source
information for your paper.
http://www.trinity.edu/~mkearl/gersopsy.html
when you get to the site, scroll to the link
Linda Woolf's Ageism Page (Webster University)--interesting stuff here.
Another google search term that turned up interesting sites is: age
stereotypes
One example:
http://www.college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/women/html/wm_035401_agestereotyp.htm
The
site I provide in the Echapter contains general subject information in
social psychology (when you get to this site link to "social psych
subject area). You can use this site to think how these areas can be
applied to aging, for example stereotypes and aging. However, it does
not specifically discuss the two areas together.Social
Psychology Network