Ageism

Past, Present, and Future

Tay K. McNamara, John B. Williamson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315472591
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Minderheitenstudien

Ageism: Past, Present, and Future presents perspectives for understanding ageism and puts ageism in the context of specific social institutions. McNamara and Williamson uniquely provide a number of complementary ways to understand ageism, including social and psychological theories of ageism, economic development, ageism as frame or lens, and ageism at the intersection of various social categories such as gender and race. They then put ageism in the context of mass media, h ealth care, employment, and public policy. This short text is an ideal addition to courses on sociology of aging, social policy, and social problems.

Part I

Ageism in Perspective

This part provides four perspectives for understanding ageism: theory (Chapter 1), economics (Chapter 2), framing (Chapter 3), and intersectionality (Chapter 4). We organize each chapter around a specific question or problem of ageism, including:

• Should we charge older adults more than younger adults for health insurance?
• Do you owe your parents support in old age, financial or otherwise?
• Are older workers taking too many of the good jobs, at the expense of the young?
• Why do actresses’ careers usually decline after age 30?

Rather than competing, the perspectives are complementary, each providing lenses suited to understanding different aspects of ageism and age discrimination.

In Chapter 1 (“Missing Pieces of the Puzzle: Theories of Ageism and Age Discrimination”), we consider the practice of charging older adults more for health insurance than younger adults. While we may attribute this practice partly to the higher health-care expenditures of older adults, this cannot be the whole story. Women also have higher health-care expenditures than men, yet few people propose charging them much higher health insurance premiums. We present five theories of ageism and discrimination (cognitive style, group bias, terror management theory, stereotype content, and statistical age discrimination) and ask the reader to determine which—if any—of these theories really explains the health insurance puzzle.

In Chapter 2 (“What Do You Owe Your Parents? The Imperfect Link between Economic Development and Ageism”), we look at the question of filial responsibility laws, laws that require adult children to provide financial support for their parents. We discuss the origin of these laws in the context of economic development, suggesting that our values—including what we think the elderly deserve and what we think we owe them—have depended in part on the shift from pre-industrial to industrial to post-industrial economies. However, there is a large cultural variation, meaning that the link between economic development and values is imperfect at best.

In Chapter 3 (“Framing Ageism: The Well-Educated Barista in Historical Perspective”), we look at the issue of whether older workers are crowding younger workers out of good jobs. We discuss the historical development of three frames, or ways of organizing experience, relevant to the well-educated barista question: compassionate ageism, which views the elderly as poor, frail, and deserving of aid; generational equity, which depicts the elderly as taking more than their fair share of resources; and generational interdependence, which focuses instead on the interconnections and shared interests of generations. In this chapter, we emphasize that while general stereotype processes (as in Chapter 1) and economic development (as in Chapter 2) influence ageism, the precise content of our views of the elderly also depends on the efforts of individuals and groups to promote competing ways to frame our experience.

In Chapter 4 (“Ageism at the Crossroads: Intersectionality and the Life Course”), we look at the example of actresses, who find that they receive fewer roles, less dialogue, lower billing, and less pay as they reach their early to mid-30s. The same is not true of actors. Centered on this example, we discuss three ways to look at intersectionality, the way that experiences and stereotypes occur at the intersection of multiple social categories such as age, gender, and race. These include: double or multiple disadvantage, stereotype buffering, and stereotype subgrouping. We then discuss how frameworks for understanding advantage or disadvantage over the life course help to explain gaps in this explanation.

At the end of this part, consider which of the four perspectives resonates the most with your experience of ageism. In Part II (“Ageism in Context”), these perspectives will reoccur in ways specifically related to particular contexts, including media, work, health care, and policy.

1 Missing Pieces of the Puzzle

Theories of Ageism and Age Discrimination

Imagine a 21-year-old woman who needs to purchase health insurance. She is healthy, but there is always the potential she could be in a car wreck or have another unexpected medical problem. The insurance company tells her that her monthly premium is $200. Now imagine a 64-year-old woman from a similar background. She is healthy, with no history of health problems associated with increased age. The insurance company tells her that her premium is $600. Is this fair? The 3 to 1 ratio between premiums is the current maximum ratio allowable under the Affordable Care Act, and some people argue that this is still unfair to younger adults and may discourage them from purchasing health insurance (Graetz, Kaplan, Kaplan, Bailey, & Waters, 2014). And while a 5 to 1 ratio, with older adults paying up to five times the health insurance costs of younger adults, is a prominent proposed alternative to the current ratio (Blumberg & Buettgens, 2013), there has been little serious discussion of a potentially age-neutral alternative: equal costs for health insurance at every age.

Is the 3 to 1 ratio ageism, age discrimination, or something else altogether? Given the right theory, or proposed explanation, we should be able to better understand why age differences in health insurance premiums are so widely accepted and what, if anything, we should do about them. But theories are most useful when they fit the evidence of real-world situations like the health insurance puzzle described above, and these types of situations often have complications that challenge any single explanation.

In this chapter, we look at the health insurance puzzle through the lens of five theories of ageism and age discrimination, including (1) cognitive style, (2) group bias, (3) terror management theory, (4) stereotype content, and (5) statistical age discrimination. Figure 1.1 summarizes these theories, divided into those that are primarily concerned with prejudice and those that are primarily concerned with discrimination. Theories of prejudice can also focus on the processes of prejudice (how and why prejudice exists) and the content of prejudice (what we actually think about other social groups). The numbers 1 through 5 indicate the major theories that we discuss, in the order we discuss them below. While these are not the only theories of ageism and age discrimination, they represent many prominent approaches.

Figure 1.1 Theories of prejudice and discrimination

As you read, ask yourself whether any one of the theories presented in this chapter really fits what you know about ageism and age discrimination in general and about the health insurance puzzle specifically. The principle of parsimony is among the most revered principles in science. Often referred to as Occam’s razor (Ariew, 1976), most people understand it as an approach to problem solving that places heavy emphasis on choosing the simplest explanation that fits the evidence. Try to select what you consider the most parsimonious explanation for the health insurance puzzle, based on the theories that we present in this chapter. Does any one theory provide a complete explanation that fits the evidence of the health insurance puzzle? If not, can you explain the missing pieces of the puzzle with another theory? By testing out Occam’s razor on a real example, you may come to some unexpected conclusions about which theories of ageism and age discrimination make the most sense to you.

One Among Many? Theories of Prejudice

Theories that explain prejudice in general have an immediate appeal in terms of parsimony. If we can understand age as just one more social category for prejudice and discrimination, like gender and race, then we do not need a separate theory to understand ageism. Below, we discuss two prominent theories about prejudice: theories that explain prejudice in terms of cognitive style and theories that explain prejudice in terms of group bias. These theories, like most other current theories of prejudice and discrimination, have in common that they treat prejudice as a normal state stemming from universal motivations, rather than a pathological state. This point of view has not always prevailed, particularly in certain political climates.

Cognitive Styles: The Shift away from Prejudice as Pathology

Cognitive theories of prejudice and discrimination arose against the backdrop of the psychoanalytic approach of the early 1950s. In the shadow of World War II and the Holocaust, psychologists struggled to understand how fascism had gained so much power on the world stage. They asked why people in Nazi Germany had been so ready to follow orders and close their eyes to atrocities against specific ethnic groups. Their answer was that the “fascist” personality must be pathological. Scholars Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950) referred to this as the “authoritarian personality.” In a book of the same name, they argued that the personalities of fascists reflected abnormal childhood circumstances. A child subjected to a strict, hierarchical, and authoritarian parent-child relationship, they wrote, tended to form a personality that used subjugation of others and prejudice against vulnerable groups as ego-defense mechanisms. This explanation had the immediate emotional appeal of separating “fascists” from “healthy” human beings. However, it came under heavy criticism in the decades following its publication. Inescapable among those criticisms was that treating prejudice as pathological flew in the face of evidence. Within the “authoritarian personality framework,” the widespread and systemic nature of prejudice was inexplicable unless almost all people had defective childhoods. Some degree of prejudice, then, must have been “normal” or at least compatible with a normal human mind.

The Normalization of Prejudice

Psychologist Gordon Allport (1979), in The Nature of Prejudice, formulated an influential explanation of prejudice as normal, linking it to cognition rather than psychoanalytic defense mechanisms. He wrote that the human mind needed to think in terms of categories and make prejudgment based on those categories. Separating all kinds of phenomena, including people, into categories was inevitable. Allport famously said, “orderly living depends upon it” (p. 30) because without those categories, it was impossible to learn from the past. Even something as simple as whether to bring an umbrella when leaving the house required prejudgment based on existing categories. We categorized times when dark clouds appeared in the sky as “rainy days” even though there were times when the clouds appeared but rain did not fall. From Allport’s point of view, prejudice was a feature of a healthy mind, not just a diseased one.

What was cause for concern, according to Allport, was resistance to contrary evidence. Almost everyone, once they had a prejudgment about a category, would resist a small dose of contrary evidence. For instance, if a person prejudged older adults as “frail” and then encountered an 80-year-old marathon runner, perhaps they would have said “Of course there are some healthy older people, but the rest are frail.” Allport likened the appearance of contrary evidence to a breach in the “fence” surrounding that social category, arguing that people had good reasons for hastily “re-fencing” this area. Not only did social norms frequently inform and support prejudgments, it was also less psychological effort to re-fence than to create entirely new, more accurate fences.

Unreasonable Re-fencing as a Cognitive Style

One question that Adorno and his colleagues posed did still need an answer. Why were some people so much more prone to cling to unreasonable prejudice? Allport recognized that not all people were equally hasty re-fencers. Some people would cling more stubbornly to their prejudices, even in the face of repeated contrary evidence and changing social norms. The prejudice-prone cognitive style included a tendency to seek and cling to definite answers and to prefer the familiar and unambiguous. Consequently, this cognitive style built stronger than average cognitive “fences” around social categories (such as “the elderly”) and was much less likely to adjust those fences in the face of contrary evidence.

More recent cognitive theories lent support to Allport’s contention that, while normal prejudgment was a necessity of life, people with certain cognitive styles were more likely to cling to those prejudgments. For instance, Roets and Van Hiel (2011) argued that Kruglanski’s (1989) need for closure, a theory originating outside the study of prejudice, mirrored Allport’s prejudice-prone cognitive style. Need for closure as a stable individual trait represented a need for “an answer on a given topic, any answer… compared to confusion and ambiguity” (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994, p. 1049). This need for closure translated into two tendencies, a tendency toward urgency in finding an answer and a tendency toward permanent adoption of that answer once found. From this perspective, all human minds needed prejudice, but certain minds were more prone to unreasonable prejudice.

A First Look at the Health Insurance Puzzle

Consider the health insurance puzzle from the cognitive perspective. From this point of view, the original difference in premiums results from normal prejudgment. Just as we use an umbrella when it rains, we consider older adults as more likely to need expensive medical care. On the face of it, this makes good sense and seems fair. However, there is an important limitation. The target group is relatively unimportant to this explanation. Allport (1979) says that prejudice is not primarily about a person’s attitude toward a group, but rather about the way that person thinks about anything. As we have discussed in the introduction, we often treat age differently. To provide another example, women have higher health-care costs than men, but the practice of charging women more for health insurance was banned under the Affordable Care Act. The same act approved the 3 to 1 ratio for older versus younger adults. The cognitive approach does not offer insight into why we treat some types of social categories such as gender differently from others such as age.

Birds of a Feather: In-Groups and Out-Groups

Unlike the cognitive approach, a second major explanation of prejudice and discrimination does attempt to explain why certain groups are more likely to be targets. This approach posits that we have an ingrained tendency to view our own group more favorably than we view other groups. Byrne (1971) writes in his description of the similarity-attraction hypothesis that “birds of a feather flock together,” but theories of group bias take this observation several steps further. Birds of a feather not only flock together, they are convinced of the superiority of their own feathers. They sometimes belittle, discriminate against, or even attack birds with different feathers. This image of favoritism toward “our kind” of people and hostility against “other” people seems a particularly condemnatory statement about the human race, but the two experiments we describe below provide less sinister explanations of two sides of the “birds of a feather” hypothesis. First, the “Robber’s Cave” experiment looks at out-group hostility, unfriendliness or opposition to people in the out-group, defined as the group of which the individual does not consider him or herself a member. Second, the Klee versus Ka...