Aging stereotype

People’s views about aging are multidimensional, with both positive and negative elements (Kite, Stockdale, Whitley, & Johnson, 2005). On one hand, elderly people are seen as warm (Cuddy, Norton, & Fiske, 2005) and wise (Rust & See, 2010) but, on the other hand as incompetent (Cuddy & Fiske, 2002; Cuddy et al., 2005), and showing physical and cognitive decline (Kite & Smith-Wagner, 2002). However, the negative aspect of the aging stereotype is strong and typical across individualistic cultures all around the world, and research suggests that this negative perception of aging begins to develop early, at around the age of 6 years (Isaacs & Bearison, 1986).

More specifically, in the Western culture, aging is associated with a decline in the efficiency of mental operations like conceptual reasoning, memory retrieval, and processing speed (Harada, Love, & Triebel, 2013). According to Erber and Prager (as cited in Cuddy et al., 2005) people are more likely to attribute memory failures of older adults to intellectual incompetence whereas memory failures of younger adults to lack of attention. Moreover, research on cognitive development across the lifespan shows age-related deficits in planning functions (e.g., Kliegel, McDaniel, & Einstein, 2000; Phillips, MacLeod, & Kliegel, 2005). Haynes et al. (2016) found failures in prospective memory—the memory for previously planned activities to be carried out in the future—in older adults, in ways of fewer completions of the intended actions during several tasks. These deficits in prospective memory may be resulting either from the decay in the frontal lobes of the brain, or from the reduced memory capacity due to aging or from fluctuations in attentional control. Furthermore, research in social psychology using implicit attitude measures found that both older and younger adults showed evidence for automatic negative traits of the aging stereotype, supporting the idea of an unintentional and unconscious aging bias (e.g., Perdue & Gurtman, 1990). Data from the Implicit Association Test (IAT)—measurement of social knowledge that may operate outside awareness or control—used by Chassard and Kop (2008) and Nosek et al. (2007), show that young/good and old/bad associations are very robust, meaning that the negative aspects of the aging stereotype are very present, both for young and older participants. Moreover, also data from a demonstration Web site measuring attitudes and stereotypes toward social groups revealed strong negative implicit attitudes towards older people (Nosek, Banaji, &

Greenwald, 2002).

Except stereotypic beliefs about aging, there is also empirical evidence from aging research that several aspects of the basic cognitive functioning indeed become less efficient with advanced age and older adults need to cope with higher difficulties than younger people when performing a cognitive task (Hess & Ennis, 2012). Moreover, older people indeed mobilize more effort when confronted with cognitive tasks. Accordingly, older people manifested stronger cardiovascular reactivity, than younger people to achieve the same level of objective cognitive performance (e.g., Ennis, Hess, & Smith, 2013; Smith & Hess, 2015).

Moreover, older people perceive tasks as subjectively more demanding and show correspondingly stronger effort-related cardiovascular response than younger people when they perform cognitive challenges of the same objective task difficulty (Hess, Smith, &

Sharifian, 2016). Aging effects on subjective task demand are even stronger among elderly suffering from mild cognitive impairment, leading already to disengagement due to excessive subjective demand in objectively easy cognitive tasks (Stewart, Wright, & Griffith, 2016).

Neuroimaging research has shown that older adults engage more brain regions than younger adults when performing at similar levels but less when task demand is too high (Cappell, Gmeindl, & Reuter-Lorenz, 2010).

Summing up, all these studies suggest that aging is indeed associated with cognitive difficulties and this negative vision of the elderly forms a network of representations that could potentially be activated by priming procedures.

1.3.1. Effects of aging stereotype activation

The perception of an individual usually leads to the activation of personality traits (Gilbert, 1989) or stereotypes (Bargh, 1994; Devine, 1989) which then affect our behavior. To start with, in Bargh et al. (1996, Experiment 2), the activation of the elderly concept using a scrambled-sentence task—words relative to the elderly stereotype were used—led young individuals to walk slower down the hallway leaving the experimental session in comparison to a neutral control condition—neutral words were used. However, Doyen, Klein, Pichon, and Cleeremans (2012) failed to replicate the findings of Bargh et al. (1996), concluding that the used design and the expectations of the experimenter in the original study could have caused this effect on behavioral level. Nevertheless, also other studies demonstrated stereotypic effects on behavior of young individuals. For instance, Branaghan and Gray (2010) showed that the implicit activation of the elderly stereotype decreased the driving speed of young

individuals, compared to a control condition. Moreover, the activation of the elderly stereotype also decreased the performance speed of university students (Ginsberg, Rohmer,

& Louvet, 2012). For Dijksterhuis, Aarts, Bargh, and van Knippenberg (2000), the frequency of contact with this social group determines the associative strength, which has been developed between the elderly concept and the typical trait of this age group “forgetfulness”. The more frequent young individuals were previously in contact with older people, the stronger was this association. As a consequence, they showed weaker performance in a memory task compared with individuals who were not frequently in contact with older people. Hsu, Chung, and Langer (2010) found that the activation of age-related concepts can even influence health and mortality of people. More specifically, these authors propose that the perception of age is integrated to a person’s identity and that the negative representations of aging could have several physiological consequences including cardiovascular health problems. The activation of the elderly stereotype can influence sport performance as well (Follenfant, Légal, Dinard,

& Meyer, 2005). In this study, student athletes were primed—repeated exposure and syntactic priming—either with the stereotype of basketball players or the elderly before throwing a weighted ball. Activation of the elderly stereotype led to weaker performance, whereas the basketball player stereotype led to increased performance.

The activation of the elderly stereotype or the positive vs. negative aspects of this stereotype has also an impact on behavior and performance of older people. In a study conducted by Levy (1996), older participants showed a decrease in their memory performance after being primed with the aging stereotype. Moreover, Levy, Hausdorff, Hencke, and Wei (2000) demonstrated that the activation of the elderly stereotype in older adults has deleterious effects also on the cardiovascular system. Accordingly, older participants primed with the negative aspects of the aging stereotype manifested stronger cardiovascular response—systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, and heart rate—to stress, compared with those exposed to the positive aspects. More recently, a study by Zuber et al.

(2017) demonstrated how stereotype threat can influence the performance of older adults in prospective memory tasks. In that study, only when the memory component of the tasks was highlighted—high stereotype threat condition for older adults—older adults’ prospective memory performance was decreased. Otherwise—low stereotype threat for older adults—

their performance was comparable to that of young adults.

That is, the aging stereotype can be activated automatically and influences a variety of behaviors without awareness. As it was shown, studies on stereotype priming highlight the predominance of the negative aspect of the aging stereotype and they demonstrate that the activation of this stereotype—even without awareness—leads people to behave in stereotype consistent ways with effects on behavior, performance, and even cardiovascular responses.

However, there is a controversy on whether it is necessary to belong to the stereotype-relevant group in order to behave consistently with the activated stereotype. Some researchers speak for the possibility of aging stereotype activation and stereotype-consistent behaviors in young adults (e.g., Bargh et al., 1996), whereas others posit that stereotype consistent behavior only occurs among members of the stereotyped group (e.g., Levy, 1996).

As we have seen above, there is empirical evidence for both camps. However, the present thesis focuses on the activation and impact of the aging stereotype in biologically young adults.

Summing up, our behavior is not always the consequence of our intention. What we perceive in our immediate environment can, without being aware of it, have an influence on how we behave. The perception of an individual belonging to a given category is likely to bring the stereotyped traits associated with this category to mind. The activated stereotype can then influence behavior. Typically, activating a stereotype leads to behaving in a manner that is consistent with that stereotype.

The next section is dedicated to effort mobilization for instrumental behavior.

Precisely, the principles of the motivational intensity theory (Brehm & Self, 1989) and the operationalization of mental effort will be discussed.