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The Pictures in Our Head
Each fall, I start my Health and Aging class at Yale by asking my students to think of an old person and list the first five words or phrases that come to mind. It can be someone real or imagined. âDonât think about it too much,â I tell everyone. âThere are no right or wrong answers. Just write down whatever associations pop into your head.â
Try it now. Think of the first five words or phrases that come to mind when you imagine an old person. Write them down.
Once youâre done, take a look at your list. How many of these are positive? How many are negative?
If you are like most people, chances are your list includes at least a few negatives. Take this response from Ron, a seventy-nine-year-old violin maker outside of Boston: âSenile, slow, sick, grumpy, and stubborn.â Now, consider this description from an eighty-two-year-old woman named Biyu in China who was in her former workplace, a pencil factory, to pick up her pension check: âWise, loves Peking Opera, reads to grandchildren, walks a lot, and kind.â
These two clashing visions reflect the vast range of age beliefs that predominate in different culturesâbeliefs that determine how we act toward our older relatives, organize our living spaces, distribute health care, and form our communities. Ultimately, these beliefs can also determine how older people think about themselves as well as how well they hear and remember, and how long they live.
Most people donât realize they hold preconceptions about aging, yet everyone, everywhere, does. Unfortunately, most of the worldâs prevailing cultural age beliefs today are negative.1 By examining these beliefs and discovering their origin, together with how they operate, weâll have a basis for changing not only the narrative of aging, but the very manner in which we age.
What Are Age Beliefs?
Age beliefs are mental maps of how we expect older people to behave based on age. These mental maps, which often include pictures in our heads, become activated when we notice members of the group in question.
When I talk about an âolder person,â by the way, Iâm usually referring to someone who is at least in their fifties, but there really is no set age threshold. How âoldâ we feel, rather than the number of years under our belt, is often based on cultural cues, such as becoming eligible for âsenior discountsâ or Social Security, or being nudged into retirement. There is actually no single biological marker to identify when someone has reached old age, which means that old age is a somewhat fluid social construct. This is one of the reasons age beliefs, with their associated expectations, are so powerful: they define how we experience our later years.
Expectations can be quite useful in many situations. When we come across a closed door, we can expect, based on previous experiences, that it will either be locked or unlocked. We generally donât have to ask ourselves whether the door will fall down flat or burst into flames if we give the handle a wiggle. We can thank our brains for this ability to process situations quickly, visually, and often automatically, which is why thereâs no need to relearn how a door works. Instead, we can rely on what we already know to be familiar. This is pretty much how we get through the world every single day: by generating and then relying on expectations.
Age beliefs are expectations about people, not doors, of course, but they operate in a similar way. Like most stereotypes or mental shortcuts, they are the product of natural, internal processes that begin when we are babies as a way of sorting and simplifying the overwhelming amount of stimuli in the world. But they are also the products of external societal sources, such as schooling, movies, or social media and the ageism that operates in these realms.
Linking Structural and Implicit Ageism
Stereotyping often happens unconsciously. Our brains make decisions up to ten seconds before weâre aware of it.2 Nobel Prizeâwinning neuroscientist Eric Kandel found that about 80 percent of our mind works unconsciously.3 This is all fine and good when youâre reaching for the door handle, but when forming impressions or making decisions about people, itâs a different story.
Stereotypes are the often-unconscious devices we use to rapidly assess our fellow human beings. A lot of the time, however, these pictures arenât based on observed or lived experiences, but rather, are absorbed uncritically from the external social world.
Most of us like to consider ourselves as capable of thinking fairly accurately about other people. But the truth is, we are social beings who carry around unconscious social beliefs that are so deeply rooted in our minds that we donât usually realize theyâve got their hooks in us. This can result in an unconscious process called âimplicit bias,â which automatically influences us to like or dislike certain groups of people. Implicit bias is hard to mitigate or even just to accept, because it so often goes against the grain of what we consciously believe. A further complication is that implicit bias often reflects structural bias.
Structural bias refers to policies or practices of societal institutions, such as corporations that discriminate against workers or hospitals that discriminate against patients. It is frequently intertwined with implicit bias. For within institutions, the discrimination may operate without the managersâ or doctorsâ awareness and therefore can be considered implicit. But at the same time, it is often structural insofar as the discrimination reinforces the power of those in authority while withholding power from those who are marginalized.
To examine both types of bias, researchers asked fellow scientists, people who usually think of themselves as objective and fair-minded, to evaluate rĂ©sumĂ©s of male and female applicants for a job. In almost every case, male applicants were more likely to be hired and offered much higher salaries than their female counterparts, in spite of what turned out to be rĂ©sumĂ©s that were identical in every way, other than the use of traditionally masculine or traditionally feminine names.4 There exists a similar culture-based racial bias: studies show that job seekers who added typical âwhiteâ identifiers to their rĂ©sumĂ©s received significantly more calls for interviews than those without these identifiers.5
The same structural and implicit bias, or ageism, exists toward older job applicants. A study found that when résumés are otherwise identical, employers tend to offer the job to younger applicants.6 This hiring pattern occurs again and again, despite abundant research showing that older workers are usually more reliable and skilled than younger workers.7 Similarly, when doctors are given identical case studies of patients with the same symptoms and likelihood of recovery, these doctors tend to be far less likely to recommend treatments for the older patients compared to the younger patients.8
The line between structural and implicit bias is thin and quite porous. Culture-based structural biases seep into our beliefs, where they are then often activated without our awareness. As a result, multiple studies show that all of us, no matter what we consciously believe, have unconscious biases.
Unconscious Running
As someone who studies self-stereotypes for a living, I didnât think I was susceptible; but of course, thereâs a difference between what you think you know and what you actually know. There are those moments in life that reveal the uncomfortable gap between the two.
Last year, I decided to run a 5K to benefit a charity that a friend of mine is involved with. It was a chilly fall Sunday morning, and my bed was particularly warm and cozy, so I hit the snooze button one time too many and arrived late. I barely had time to pin on a race bib and lace up my sneakers when the starting pistol went off. I was about two hundred yards into the race, running past a cluster of tall elm trees, when I heard a nasty popping sound and the back of my knee suddenly flooded with pain. I stumbled a bit and groaned. An image immediately appeared in my mindâa scene from the sci-fi film Lucy, in which Scarlett Johansson plays a woman whose body parts quickly disintegrate into sparkly dots after smugglers implant a dangerous drug in her stomach. As I envisioned it, my body, my once trusted and reliable friend, was precipitously disintegrating in the same fashion, only age, and not some sci-fi lab drug, was the culprit.
I hobbled past the finish line and even gave a grim smile to the friend who had encouraged me to participate. After I drove home, I limped inside, complaining that my middle-aged body was succumbingâall too earlyâto the ravages of age. Here I was, I thought, facing the sad and premature end of my running days.
Then, my husband, who is a doctor, inspected my leg and told me that I had badly pulled a muscle.
At that moment, my teenage daughter chimed in. Sheâd been on her laptop that morning and had watched me rush out the door for the race.
âYou got there late, didnât you?â she asked.
I nodded.
âDid you warm up?â
I shook my head. Who has time to warm up when you show up late?
She smiled. âWell, there you go.â
We all like to run in my family. We all know that warm-ups activate your muscles, stretching and lengthening them to protect them from being pulled too far and tearing. My other daughter, less than a month prior, had pulled a leg muscle of her own by dashing off on a run without stretching.
There you go.
Instead of being relieved that my body wasnât suddenly falling to pieces, I was troubled. I had instinctively attributed my injury to something other than skipping a warm-up. Instead, I had blamed my age: my mind had made connections that I donât consciously believeâthat your body falls apart as you age. And I have been studying aging since the start of graduate school. More than most, I should know that this isnât the case. So what happened? The negative stereotypes I had absorbed since childhood from the surrounding culture materialized in a sudden fear of age-related frailty, which led me to misattribute the cause of the pain in my knee.
This is one of the most harmful things about negative age stereotypes: they donât only color our actions and judgments toward other people; often, they influence how we think about ourselves, and these thoughtsâif they are not counteractedâcan impact how we feel and act.
When I was starting out as a social psychologist, the existing studies on age stereotypes were limited to how age beliefs influenced the views and behavior of children and young adults toward older people. The research ignored the ways in which age stereotypes impacted older people themselves. But after watching my grandmother absorb and respond to the negative age stereotype directed at her from the ageist store owner, I became convinced that to reduce the likelihood that this kind of event would occur in the future and to find ways to harness the power of age beliefs to bring about benefits, I would first need...
