Does Aging Affect the Use of Shifting Standards? (original) (raw)
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Frontiers in Psychology, 2021
Test conditions eliciting negative stereotypes of aging among older adults can prompt age-based stereotype threat (ABST), which results in worse performance on cognitive and memory tests. Much of this research explores ABST as a phenomenon that impacts the performance of older adults. Little is known about the experience of ABST beyond performance settings and how it manifests in everyday contexts across different age groups. Gaps also remain in understanding the wider impacts of ABST, such as effects on task motivation and engagement. The current research addresses this by exploring the contexts in which age-based judgement, a theorized precursor to ABST, occurs across a wide age range of participants. The two studies in this paper present mixed-methods survey data for a total of 282 respondents aged 18–84 years. Study 1 presents a thematic analysis of open-ended responses to identify the stereotypes and settings that underpin perceived age-based judgement. The settings and stereot...
Shifting standards and stereotype-based judgments
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1994
Four studies tested a model of stereotype-based shifts in judgment standards developed by M. Biernat, M. Manis, and T. E. Nelson (1991). The model suggests that subjective judgments of target persons from different social groups may fail to reveal the stereotyped expectations of judges, because they invite the. use of different evaluative standards; more "objective" or common rule indicators reduce such standard shifts. The stereotypes that men are more competent than women, women are more verbally able than men, Whites are more verbally able than Blacks, and Blacks are more athletic than Whites were successfully used to demonstrate the shifting standards phenomenon. Several individual-difference measures were also effective in predicting differential susceptibility to standard shifts, and direct evidence was provided that differing comparison standards account for substantial differences in target ratings.
The Activation of Aging Stereotypes in Younger and Older Adults
The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 2002
The activation of ageism and aging stereotypes in younger and older adults was investigated by manipulating both the valence and the stereotypicality of trait stimuli. Participants completed a lexical decision task in which the stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) between the prime and target stimuli were varied to examine the effects of automatic and controlled processing (300 and 2,000 ms, respectively). Both younger and older adults demonstrated strong stereotype activation for elderly stereotypes but relatively weak activation for young stereotypes. Both younger and older adults also demonstrated a positive bias toward older people, which was not moderated by SOA. These findings suggest that younger and older adults do not differ in their accessibility to aging stereotypes or to their age-based biases, which appear to be positive toward elderly people.
Stereotypes and standards of judgment
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1991
People routinely adjust their subjective judgment standards as they evaluate members of stereotyped social groups. Such shifts are less likely to occur, however, when judgments are made on stable, "objective" response scales. In 3 studies, subjects judged a series of targets with respect to a number of gender-relevant attributes (e.g. t height, weight, and income), using either subjective (Likert-type) or objective response scales (e.g., inches, pounds, and dollars). Objective judgments were consistently influenced by sex stereotypes; subjective judgments were not. Results were also consistent with the expectation that when a judgment attribute is unrelated to gender, male and female targets evoke the same judgment standards. A schematic model of how stereotyped mental representations are expressed on subjectively defined rating scales is presented, and implications for the study of person perception are discussed. This research was supported by a grant from the Veterans Administration. We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Chris Crandall, Barry Schlenker, Roger Blashfield, and several anonymous reviewers on an earlier draft.
Age Stereotyping: Are we Oversimplifying the Phenomenon?
The International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 1986
This study investigates the use of age stereotypes in evaluating individuals' behavior in context-specific situations. One hundred university students assessed young male, young female, old male, and old female characters in four vignettes using the Rosencranz and McNevin Semantic Differential. The data revealed limited but conflicting evidence of the use of stereotypes when the stimuli portrayed target characters in lifelike situations rather than in an experimental vacuum. It is argued that while stereotyping can occur in specific contexts, its form is greatly influenced by other aspects of the situation. The need to reconceptualize the notion of stereotypes of the elderly is discussed, and a shift in emphasis toward the analysis of subgroup stereotypes as opposed to one consistent global stereotype of old age is urged.
Psychology and Aging, 2015
Stereotype threat effects arise when an individual feels at risk of confirming a negative stereotype about their group and consequently underperforms on stereotype relevant tasks (Steele, 2010). Among older people, underperformance across cognitive and physical tasks is hypothesized to result from age-based stereotype threat (ABST) because of negative age-stereotypes regarding older adults' competence. The present review and meta-analyses examine 22 published and 10 unpublished articles, including 82 effect sizes (N ϭ 3882) investigating ABST on older people's (M age ϭ 69.5) performance. The analysis revealed a significant small-to-medium effect of ABST (d ϭ .28) and important moderators of the effect size. Specifically, older adults are more vulnerable to ABST when (a) stereotype-based rather than fact-based manipulations are used (d ϭ .52); (b) when performance is tested using cognitive measures (d ϭ .36); and (c) occurs reliably when the dependent variable is measured proximally to the manipulation. The review raises important theoretical and methodological issues, and areas for future research.
Psychology and Aging, 2009
Older individuals assimilate, and are targeted by, contradictory positive and negative age stereotypes. It was unknown whether the influence of stereotype valence is stronger when the stereotype content corresponds to the outcome domain. We randomly assigned older individuals to either positivecognitive, negative-cognitive, positive-physical, or negative-physical subliminal-age-stereotype groups and assessed cognitive and physical outcomes. As predicted, when the age stereotypes corresponded to the outcome domains, their valence had a significantly greater impact on cognitive and physical performance. This suggests that if a match occurs, it is more likely to generate expectations that become self-fulfilling prophecies.
The activation of specific facets of age stereotypes depends on individuating information
We investigated the context-dependency of an activation of different age stereotypes, using a sentence priming paradigm in combination with a lexical decision task. In two studies, pictures of young vs. old people were combined with sentences describing specifi c situations and behavioral activities to yield a compound prime comprising category and context information. Signifi cant category priming effects for stereotypic traits (e.g., Slow for an old stimulus person) emerged for matching contexts (e.g., in combination with "she is crossing the street") but not for irrelevant contexts (e.g., in combination with "she is watering the fl owers"). In a third and fourth study, explanations of these results in terms of interference effects of irrelevant contexts or of nonmatching age categories were ruled out by showing that neither age information nor matching context information alone leads to an activation of stereotypic traits. Our fi ndings indicate that category information interacts with individuating information (being in a specifi c context, engaging in a certain behavioral activity) in activating specifi c aspects of age stereotypes. Some part of the mental representation of age stereotypes might thus consist in specifi c schemas that are triggered by a combination of category and individuating information.