The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 58:P212-P216 (2003)
© 2003 The Gerontological Society of America
Commentaries on "Mind Matters: Cognitive and Physical Effects of Aging Self-Stereotypes" and Author's Reply
When Is an Age Stereotype an Aging Self-Stereotype? A Commentary
Mary Lee Hummert
University of Kansas
Address correspondence to Mary Lee Hummert, Communication Studies Department, University of Kansas, 102 Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS 66045. E-mail: mlhummert{at}ukans.edu
Levy (2003)
provides convincing evidence that mind does indeed matter in the case of age stereotypes and their impact on older persons. The article offers critical insights about the power of age stereotypes in the lives of older individuals. These insights derive primarily from Levy's review of her excellent and innovative program of research and her outline of directions for future research. These topics appear in the last half of the article. The first half of the article presents a description of the process through which age stereotypes influence the behaviors of older persons (i.e., the theoretical foundation for the research program). This description has some limitations in light of other stereotype theory and research.
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Insights From "Mind Matters"
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Research on age stereotypes began with an emphasis on their potential for biased judgments and behaviors toward older people (see Hummert, 1999, for a review). The Levy research program constitutes a significant advance in its emphasis on self-stereotype effects and their implicit or unconscious operation. The program provides unequivocal evidence that age stereotypes can function as self-stereotypes to affect the responses of older persons themselves in a wide variety of domains, from intentions (e.g., to pursue life-prolonging interventions), to cognitive functioning (e.g., memory), to physical reactions (e.g., cardiovascular stress). Consistent with research on the positive and negative aspects of age stereotypes (Hummert, Garstka, Shaner, & Strahm, 1994), the Levy studies illustrate that self-stereotype effects can be either beneficial or detrimental to older persons, depending on the valence of the stereotype that is activated. The most powerful example of this last point comes from the longitudinal research of Levy, Slade, Kunkel, and Kasl (2002) in which positive self-perceptions of aging earlier in life are shown to predict longevity.
Second, the Levy studies show that age stereotypes can lead to stereotype-consistent behaviors even when activation occurs at the implicit or unconscious level. Levy asserts that age identity may be an important factor in the implicit effects because younger participants in her research have not exhibited the stereotype-consistent behaviors of the older participants, even though both groups of participants may have similar age stereotypes. Research on implicit age stereotypes and identity supports this interpretation to an extent. Hummert, Garstka, O'Brien, Greenwald, and Mellott (2002) found that older and younger persons have similar implicit negative stereotypes, but differ in their implicit age identity, with older participants identifying less with youth than did the young participants. However, contrary to the characterization of these results in Levy (2003), even the oldest participants in the study identified more strongly with youth than with old age. This suggests that minor variations in age identity may be sufficient to produce self-stereotyping effects, a conclusion supported by results of an experiment involving participants in late middle age (48–60 years of age) (Hummert & O'Brien, 2002). In that study, implicit age identity, but not implicit age stereotypes, moderated the effects of a manipulation designed to induce assimilation to the memory-age stereotype: Only those participants with less youthful (though clearly not old) implicit age identities exhibited poorer recall in response to the manipulation.
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Psychological Processes and Aging Self-Stereotypes
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While the article does an excellent job of articulating insights from the Levy studies, it is less successful in its attempt to ground them in a theory about the development of age stereotypes and their evolution into aging self-stereotypes. In brief, the process is described as one in which age stereotypes are "internalized" at a young age and "reinforced" as people mature. Then, when individuals themselves enter old age, those age stereotypes become "aging self-stereotypes." There are two problems with this description of the process.
The first centers on the use of internalization and reinforcement to describe how individuals develop age stereotypes. Internalization implies that the stereotypes are somehow "out there" and children adopt them as unified wholes. Reinforcement implies that the internalized age stereotypes are static cognitive structures. Yet research has demonstrated that even though the age stereotypes held by different individuals may be similar, they are not exactly the same (Hummert et al., 1994). Further, several studies have found that older persons have more complex stereotypes and views of the aging process than do younger individuals (Hummert, 1999). Although based on cross-sectional rather than longitudinal data, these studies suggest that age stereotypes change over time. Therefore it would seem more appropriate to discuss the process of learning or developing age stereotypes rather than internalizing and reinforcing them, as occurs later in the article in a call for research on "the development of implicit and explicit aging stereotypes" (Levy, 2003) in children.
The second problem relates to the premise that when one becomes a certain age, age stereotypes become aging self-stereotypes. This premise suggests that generic age stereotypes cease to exist at a certain point in the lifespan or, at the very least, that they are isomorphic with aging self-stereotypes. This view requires some tricky reinterpretations of prior research, as in the characterization (Levy, 2003) of older participants' judgments about the memory failure of an older target (Erber, Szuchman, & Rothberg, 1990) as reflecting aging self-stereotypes but the judgments of young participants as reflecting aging stereotypes.
Although others also have applied the label self-stereotypes to stereotypes of one's own group (e.g., Wheeler & Petty, 2001), it is intuitively difficult to classify perceptions of other people—even members of one's own group—as self-stereotypes. Further, older individuals' self-perceptions sometimes differ from their stereotypes of other older people in that they expect age-related decline to be more severe for others than for themselves (Crockett & Hummert, 1987; cf. Ryan & Kwong See, 1993). A similar disjuncture has been found between men's implicit gender stereotypes of males as more potent than warm and their implicit self-concepts as more warm than potent (Rudman, Greenwald, & McGhee, 2001, Exp. 4). Finally, it is difficult to determine unequivocally whether effects reported in the Levy studies that employed subliminal priming reflect the activation of age self-stereotypes or simply generic age stereotypes. As acknowledged in the article (Levy, 2003), only the longitudinal studies (e.g., Levy et al., 2002) unequivocally address the effects of aging self-stereotypes as perceptions about participants' own aging.
One way to avoid the dilemmas posed by this premise is to adopt a distinction between stereotypes as cognitive structures, and stereotyping as the process of applying stereotypes in situ (Hummert, 1999; Leyens, Yzerbyt, & Schadron, 1994). Within this theoretical framework, the Levy studies would be seen as evidence of self-stereotyping, i.e., behavioral assimilation to self-relevant stereotypes. Advantages of this framework include (a) its ability to embrace both generic stereotypes of one's group and self-stereotypes of oneself as a group member as "self-relevant stereotypes," and both stereotype threat and positive self-stereotype effects as "self-stereotyping"; and (b) its heuristic value for future research on the mechanisms (e.g., psychological influences such as age identity and age stereotypes, and situational influences such as the salience of age in context) underlying self-stereotyping.
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Summary
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The research program presented in this article illustrates the importance of social psychological research on how age stereotypes affect the behaviors of older persons. To date this program has been largely descriptive, establishing the nature and range of self-stereotyping behaviors among older individuals. The directions for future research, however, promise insights into the psychological processes underlying the documented effects of aging self-stereotypes. Grounding that research in a theory of self-stereotyping will advance this research program toward its admirable goal of "ameliorating the harmful effects of negative self-stereotypes of aging" (Levy, 2003).
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Acknowledgments
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Preparation of this article was supported by National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Aging Grant AG 16352.
Received for publication January 15, 2003.
Accepted for publication February 14, 2003.
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References
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- Crockett, W. H., Hummert, M. L. (1987). Perceptions of aging and the elderly. Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 7,217-241.
- Erber, J. T., Szuchman, L. T., Rothberg, S. T. (1990). Age, gender, and individual differences in memory failure appraisal. Psychology and Aging, 5,600-603.[Medline]
- Hummert, M. L. (1999). A social cognitive perspective on age stereotypes. In T. M. Hess & F. Blanchard-Fields (Eds.), Social cognition and aging (pp. 175–195). New York: Academic Press.
- Hummert, M. L., Garstka, T. A., O'Brien, L., Greenwald, A. G., Mellott, D. S. (2002). Using the Implicit Association Test to measure age differences in implicit social perceptions. Psychology and Aging, 17,482-495.[Medline]
- 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,P240-P249.
- Hummert, M. L., O'Brien, L. T. (2002, November). Age self-stereotyping, stereotype threat, and memory performance in middle-aged adults. Presented at the annual meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, Boston, MA.
- Levy, B. R. (2003). Mind matters: Cognitive and physical effects of aging self-stereotypes. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 58B,P203-P211.[Abstract/Free Full Text]
- Levy, B. R., Slade, M. D., Kunkel, S., Kasl, S. V. (2002). Increased longevity by positive self-perceptions of aging. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83,261-270.[Medline]
- Leyens, J-P., Yzerbyt, V., Schadron, G. (1994). Stereotypes and social cognition. London: Sage.
- Rudman, L., Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E. (2001). Implicit self-concept and evaluative implicit gender stereotypes: Self and ingroup share desirable traits. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27,1164-1178.[Abstract/Free Full Text]
- Ryan, E. B., Kwong See, S. (1993). Age-based beliefs about memory change for self and others across adulthood. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 48,P199-P201.
- Wheeler, S. C., Petty, R. E. (2001). The effects of stereotype activation on behavior: A review of possible mechanisms. Psychological Bulletin, 127,797-826.[Medline]
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B. R. Levy
Conscious Versus Unconscious Levels of Aging Self-Stereotypes: Author's Reply
J. Gerontol. B. Psychol. Sci. Soc. Sci.,
July 1, 2003;
58(4):
P215 - 216.
[Full Text]
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