Abstract
An age-stereotype paradox has developed in the United States due to factors that would suggest age stereotypes should be increasing in positivity over time; whereas, recent evidence shows they are becoming more negative. Reasons for predicting an increase in positivity are presented, followed by reasons that help to explain why the reverse is occurring. To illustrate the age-stereotype paradox, four domains that help to shape the status of older individuals were selected: health, intergenerational contact, legislation, and social climate. Two proposals are then made for eliminating the paradox by reversing the age-stereotypes negativity trend: establishment of an anti-aging czar and the launching of an aging-rights movement.
Maggie Kuhn, the founder of the Gray Panthers, argued in 1978 that the prevalent cultural view of old age “as a disastrous disease, which nobody wants to admit to having” should be eliminated and replaced with an image of old age as a time of “strength” (Dychtwald, 2012). Yet, recent studies suggest that in the subsequent decades, age stereotypes (or beliefs about old people as a category) have become more negative (Mason, Kuntz, & Mcgill, 2015; Ng, Allore, Trentalange, Monin, & Levy, 2015). This trend contributes to what could be called an “age-stereotype paradox.” Two contradictory elements comprise this paradox: the increase in age-stereotype negativity versus an increase in age-stereotype positivity that a number of factors suggest should be occurring.
The first part of this article presents delineations of the two age-stereotype paradox components. The second part examines the age-stereotype paradox in relation to four domains. The third part proposes strategies for reversing the age-stereotype negativity trend that underlies the paradox.
Components of the Age-Stereotype Paradox
Age-stereotype valence is consequential because, consistent with stereotype embodiment theory (Levy, 2009), these stereotypes, which are assimilated from a variety of sources in the surrounding culture, impact younger individuals’ perceptions of and behaviors toward older individuals (Jarrott & Savla, 2016; Kornadt, Voss, & Rothermund, 2015; Kwong See, Rasmussen, & Pertman, 2012); and in later life, the age stereotypes can impact self-perceptions, which, in turn, can influence health and functioning (e.g., Levy, 2009; Westerhof et al., 2014). Compared to older individuals with more-negative age stereotypes, those with more-positive age stereotypes tend to experience better cognitive functioning, reduced risk of disability and cardiovascular events, less accumulation of Alzheimer’s disease biomarkers, lower stress response, and increased longevity (Levy, 1996; Levy, Hausdorff, Hencke, & Wei, 2000; Levy, Slade, Kunkel, & Kasl, 2002; Levy, Slade, Murphy, & Gill, 2012; Levy, Zonderman, Slade, & Ferrucci, 2009; Levy et al., 2016). This pattern of age stereotypes impacting older individuals in ways that are consistent with the valence of the stereotypes has been supported by studies conducted on five continents and reported in four meta-analyses (e.g., Horton, Baker, Pearce, & Deakin, 2008; Lamont, Swift, & Abrams, 2015; Meisner, 2012; Westerhof et al., 2014).
Potential Contributors to Age-Stereotype Positivity Over Time
If someone had been briefed 100 years ago about future age-related trends in American society, this person might well have predicted that age stereotypes would become more positive over time. Four trends, that will be examined in the current article, could lead to this conclusion: (a) steadily improving health of older individuals, which belies negative age stereotypes; (b) growing percentage of the population that is old, so that there could be more intergroup contact which can break down negative stereotypes; (c) the passage of legislation that promotes a positive image of aging; and (d) increasingly positive views of several previously stigmatized groups.
Evidence Age Stereotypes Becoming More Negative
To examine the pattern of age-stereotype valence over time, two independent groups of researchers, using recently developed methods based on computerized searches of digitized verbal documents, found that age stereotypes have increased in negativity across 200 years (Mason, Kuntz, & Mcgill, 2015; Ng, Allore, Trentalange, Monin, & Levy, 2015). Because both studies included material that was widely read by the public, the identified age stereotypes were likely to have affected age-stereotype usage as well as have reflected the popular stereotypes.
The first study examined age stereotypes over time by analyzing the Corpus of Historical American English, a database of over 400 million words that draws from books, magazines, newspapers, and academic journals published between 1810 and 2009 (Davies, 2010). The authors identified and rated 100 collocates, or words that appeared most frequently with the word “elderly” and its synonyms drawn from historical thesauri (Ng et al., 2015). The age stereotypes were in the positive section of a continuum during the first 80 years studied; afterwards, they became increasingly negative.
The second study, that also found a trend of increasing age-stereotype negativity, relied on a content-analysis tool, Google Books Ngram Viewer, that determines the frequency of words drawn from over five-million digitized books that were published in English from 1800 to 2000 (Michel et al., 2011). The authors tracked the usage of terms and adjectives describing the old. They concluded that the analyses “revealed a shift from more positive to less positive terms” (Mason et al., 2015, p. 324). For example, it was found that “geezers,” from its first appearance in 1900, became 11 times more frequent over the next 100 years.
These computer-based analyses of age stereotypes harmonize with the findings of several historians who found that views toward older individuals increased in negativity from colonial America, when older individuals tended to be integrated into daily life and honored, to subsequent times when older individuals tended to be disparaged and segregated (Achenbaum, 1995; Chudacoff, 1989; Cole, 1992; Fischer, 1978). Historic manifestations of reduced age-stereotype positivity can be found in fashions that changed from making younger people look older to ones that made older people look younger, and the elimination of seating arrangements in meeting halls that gave prime reserved places to older members of the community, regardless of their financial standing (Cole, 1992; Fischer, 1978).
Four Age-Stereotype Paradox Domains
In order to illustrate the age-stereotype paradox, the next section of the article presents its operation in four domains. For each domain, the theoretical and empirical bases for expecting a trend of age-stereotype positivity is followed by a discussion of the factors that contribute to the actual trend of age-stereotype negativity. The four domains selected are those that help shape the status of older individuals in society. The domains consist of health, intergroup contact, legislation, and social climate.
Age-Stereotype Paradox Domain 1: Health
Theory and research suggest that if the health of older individuals markedly improves over time, it should increase the positivity of age stereotypes. Observing individuals in everyday life influences the content of stereotypes, according to social role theory (Koenig & Eagly, 2014). Experimental research has found that exposure to positive exemplars, including physically and socially active older individuals, can decrease age-stereotype negativity and increase age-stereotype positivity (Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001; Levy, Pilver, Chung, & Slade, 2014). Further, improved health should serve as a refutation of negative age stereotypes, which are predominantly based on the assumption that bad health is inherent to aging (Levy, 2003).
Therefore, greater age-stereotype positivity might be expected from the trend of improved aging health. In the last 100 years, there has been a growing “active life expectancy,” which has led to the aging population being “increasingly represented by vigorous robust older people” (Butler, 2010, p. 12). Improvements in the health of older individuals over the last century include a decrease in the rates of disability, hip fracture, dementia, visual problems, arthritis, emphysema, and heart disease, as well as declines in cholesterol level, and blood pressure (Kolata, 2016; Satizabal et al., 2016; Schoeni et al., 2008).
Despite the objective reality of aging health moving in a positive direction, the subjective reality of age stereotypes is moving in a negative direction. The discordance may be explained in part by the multi-billion-dollar anti-aging industry. This collection of companies, that sells creams, injections, surgeries, and pills that falsely claim to reverse aging, profits from promoting a negative view of aging (Binstock, 2003; Gendron, Welleford, Inker, & White, 2016; Perls, 2004). An analysis of this ubiquitous marketing found that there is a pattern of:
the industry’s pernicious and false portrayal of older people. The hucksters’ sensationalized images of older people as withering and frail individuals staring at nursing home walls reinforce our youth-oriented society’s inaccurate and bias-engendering perceptions of aging. Anti-aging has become synonymous with anti-old people. (Perls, 2004, p. 686)
One of the industry’s advertisements stated that its product is the “Good Housekeeping Anti-Aging Gold Winner,” and it can “help with the battles against the 5 signs of aging hair” (Vermont Country Store Catalogue, 2015, p. 21). This promotes stigmatization by placing alleged attributes of the old in a category against which it is necessary to conduct “battles.”
The rapid growth of the anti-aging industry has been assisted by marketers using the expanding internet to reach not only older individuals, but also prospective customers in their 20s and 30s, with promises that their products will allow them to resist aging (Binstock, 2003; Gendron et al., 2016).
In both old and new media, negative stereotypes about aging health are fostered by contrasting them to positive stereotypes about youthfulness. To illustrate, human-growth hormone, a profitable elixir of the anti-aging industry, was advertised, in a recent issue of a magazine affiliated with the United States government, for anyone who “doesn’t want to age rapidly but would rather stay young, beautiful and healthy all of the time” (Smithsonian, 2016, p. 105).
Age-Stereotype Paradox Domain 2: Intergenerational Contact
According to intergroup contact theory, more contact between members of a stigmatized group and a nonstigmatized group will lead to more positive views of the stigmatized group (Al Ramiah & Hewstone, 2013). A meta-analysis supporting intergroup contact theory found that even “mere exposure” led to a reduction in prejudice; the effects were found with a broad range of out-group targets, including older individuals (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006, p. 766). Thus, with the percentage of older individuals steadily increasing over the last century (Vaupel, 2010), there should be more opportunities available for intergenerational contact, which should lead to more-positive age stereotypes.
A reason that the percentage increase of older individuals is not leading to more-positive age stereotypes may be that rather than intergenerational contact increasing during the last century, there has been an increase in the “spatial, institutional, and cultural separation of persons who are in different phases of the life course” (Hagestad & Uhlenberg, 2005, p. 345). For instance, in 1850, 70% of older individuals in the United States lived with their adult children and 11% lived with only a spouse or lived alone; by 1990, 16% of older individuals lived with their adult children and 70% lived with only a spouse or alone (Ruggles & Brower, 2003).
Contributing to age segregation is the societal perception that it is beneficial to separate older individuals from younger individuals, which is signaled by examples of this segregation in everyday life. In contrast, other types of segregation, such as racial, tend to be considered harmful by scholars, policy makers, and the general public (Hagestad & Uhlenberg, 2005). This is in spite of the fact that age segregation can reinforce ageism, which can reinforce the segregation (Griffore & Phenice, 2015; Riley & Riley, 2000).
Concurrent with the increasing age segregation, the increasing percentage of older individuals has been portrayed in a way that has likely contributed to the rise in age-stereotype negativity. This has occurred through the emergence of a stereotype about the old as drainers of scarce resources (Löckenhoff et al., 2009). A number of media outlets have contributed to this negative age stereotype by stoking the scarce-resource fear. For instance, Forbes featured an article entitled, “A Silver Tsunami Invades the Health of Nations” (Das, 2011). It used this natural disaster term to describe a perceived threat by the old to health-care systems that also serve the young; a Google search of “silver” or “gray tsunami” produced 3,250,000 references (January, 2017).
Pitting age groups against each other is built on a false dichotomy, because health care for one of these groups does not jeopardize health care for other groups (Butler, 2010). Also, in contrast to the drainer stereotype, it has been shown that older individuals tend to oppose governmental programs aimed at primarily benefiting their own age group (Levy & Schlesinger, 2005).
Age segregation has been a loss for both those who are old and those who are not, because “At a time when large numbers of people reaching old age are healthy and educated, structural lag in the major social institutions deny the old opportunities for productive engagement in the larger society” (Hagestad & Uhlenberg, 2005, p. 347).
Age-Stereotype Paradox Domain 3: Legislation
It has been proposed that one way to increase the positivity of stereotypes about a group is through legislation aimed at improving how members of that group are treated (Hatzenbuehler, 2014; Meyer, 2003). The ability of laws to change opinions was shown by a study that found physicians’ support for Medicare increased from 38% before the passage of legislation establishing this program for older patients to 70% 10 months after it was passed but before it was implemented, and then to 81% 6 months after the law was implemented (Colombotos, 1969). Laws can also lead to improved views about minority-group members: for instance, desegregation resulted in white merchant marines’ views of Blacks becoming more positive as their number of voyages together increased (Brophy, 1946).
To address forms of ageism that developed in the United States during the twentieth century (i.e., upper-age limits in hiring and mandatory retirement), Congress enacted the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which was expanded with an amendment in 1986 to abolish mandatory retirement (Neumark, Burn, & Button, 2015; United States Department of Labor, 1965). The octogenarian United States Senator Claude Pepper, who acted as the catalyst for this legislation, argued that “abolishing age discrimination will offer new hope to older workers who are desperate to maintain their independence and dignity” (Noble, 1986).
It might be expected that more positive perceptions of older workers would result from this legislation aimed at improving their treatment in the workplace. For the law challenges the negative age stereotype that older individuals have lower worth and are, therefore, not entitled to the same rights as younger individuals (Neumark et al., 2015). Also, the law might have increased opportunities for older workers to display capabilities, which, according to research findings, contradict negative age stereotypes. Among these findings: older workers tend to be as or more productive than younger workers and tend to be as comfortable with using technology in the workplace as younger workers (Börsch-Supan, 2013; Cutler, 2005; DeNisco, 2016; James, Besen, & Pitt-Catsouphes, 2011).
In actuality, negative age stereotypes and age discrimination continue to prosper in workplaces. A survey, conducted in 2014, found that two-thirds of the respondents had observed ageism in the workplace and, of those, 92% reported it is very or somewhat common (FitzPatrick, 2014). The stereotypes that older workers are less productive and less comfortable with technology are still commonly held by employers (Börsch-Supan, 2013; DeNisco, 2016).
There are several reasons why the age-discrimination laws have not eliminated ageism, and the accompanying negative age stereotypes, in the workplace: (a) inadequate enforcement of the relevant laws (Neumark, 2009); (b) workers may not file complaints because the process is complicated as well as expensive and, when they are filed, only a small fraction of the cases make it to trial (Lahey, 2008; Neumark et al., 2015); (c) companies are less likely to hire older workers knowing that they are protected by laws (Lahey, 2008); (d) the laws may have precipitated a partial shift of ageism from the blatant to the subtle; and (e) research has demonstrated that coercion without persuasion, or passing laws aimed at changing harmful behaviors without complementary education, rarely leads to lasting change in beliefs and behaviors (Colgrove, 2006; Schudson, 1993).
Age-Stereotype Paradox Domain 4: Social Climate
A survey covering the past 100 years concluded that a “Humanitarian Revolution” has occurred, in which negative stereotypes about disempowered groups have become more positive because of a decline in the “dehumanizing and demonization of minority groups” that “transformed Western culture” (Pinker, 2012, pp. 168, 392). Given the sweep of this reported transformation, it should presumably include age stereotypes.
An increase over time in stereotype positivity directed at stigmatized groups was shown by the Princeton trilogy studies (Gilbert, 1951; Karlins, Coffman, & Walters, 1969; Katz & Braly, 1933) and a replication study (Madon et al., 2001), which measured the views held by four generations of college students. For example, from 1933 to 2001, the percentage of students that described African Americans as “ignorant” fell from 38% to 3.5% (Madon et al., 2001).
Another analysis concluded that during the period from World War II to the mid-1960s, stereotypes of Japanese Americans underwent an “astounding transformation from being legally considered unassimilable aliens unfit for citizenship to being accepted as highly successful law-abiding and patriotic Americans” (Okamura, 2015, p. 179).
The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community is the stigmatized group that has most recently achieved a significant increase in acceptance (Ghaziani, 2015; Hatzenbuehler, Keyes, & Hasin, 2009; Savin-Williams, 2005). This acceptance can be gauged by several indicators, such as the waning of “gayborhoods” that developed between World War II and 1998 as safe havens from negative stereotypes and other aspects of homophobia (Ghaziani, 2015); a marked decrease in the average age of coming out for gay and lesbian young adults (Savin-Williams, 2005); the growing number of publicly self-identified gay and lesbian prominent people in a range of spheres, including television, business, web series, and politics (McCormack, 2012); the legalization of same-sex marriage; and the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Yet, the “Humanitarian Revolution” has excluded the old. For rather than leading to a universal amelioration of negative stereotypes, the Revolution has been confined to specific groups.
Further, instead of benefitting from the climate of demarginalization, older individuals may have been penalized by it. That is, a zero-sum dynamic of stigmatization may be operating, such that the same core level of prejudice is maintained by society over time, no matter how it is distributed (Reich, 2016). An unwillingness, or inability, of the dominant in-group (e.g., the young) to forsake all prejudice may be partially explained by its benefiting from the maintenance of subordinate out-groups (e.g., the old): “Positive social identity is based to a large extent on favorable comparisons that can be made between the in-group and some relevant out-groups: the in-group must be perceived as positively differentiated or distinct from the relevant out-groups” (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Given this role of comparisons, as the stigmatization directed at an out-group diminishes, it could lead to the development of what might be called “compensatory animus.” This might be achieved by finding a new group to stigmatize or by more intensely stigmatizing an existing group, such as the old. Not only a psychological benefit may be at stake, for social stratification theory postulates that dominant group members create social structures in order to maintain their power (Bengston, 2016; Parsons, 1940).
Negative stereotypes about the old may have a particular likelihood of persistence because they often refer to cognitive and physical debilitation, which tends to be perceived as a precursor to death, with a culture-based sense of foreboding (Becker, 1997; Levy & Banaji, 2004; Nelson, 2005). This perception is likely to be amplified by the recognition that negative age stereotypes could describe one’s future: the young will eventually become old, if they live long enough—an expectation that may have increased over the years with longer life spans. Consequently, negative age stereotypes may fill a felt need by younger individuals to distance themselves from older individuals.
The old are also distinct from various previously stigmatized groups by never having been organized into a widespread social movement. These other groups have used the movements to achieve, in varying degrees, more-positive stereotypes about their members. The potential benefits accruing to older individuals launching their own social movement are discussed in the next section of this article.
Eliminating the Age-Stereotype Paradox
The optimum means of overcoming the negativity component of the age-stereotype paradox would be through a combination of two approaches: top-down (i.e., from society to the individual) and bottom-up (i.e., from the individual to society).
The top-down approach could be spearheaded by an anti-ageism czar. This would be equivalent to what is unofficially called the “drug czar.” Instead of a war on drugs, the proposed czar would conduct a war on ageism in general and negative age stereotypes in particular. The official title of the drug czar is director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Thus, the new position could be called “director of the White House Office of National Ageism Control Policy.”
The appropriate mandate of the anti-ageism czar would be to initiate policies within the Executive branch and to lobby Congress for legislation that, in both cases, counteract negative age stereotypes and their manifestation in ageism. Creation of the anti-ageism czar could be politically feasible, because the rationale for it is comparable to the one applied to the drug czar: ageism and negative age stereotypes impose a heavy social and economic burden on the United States.
The anti-ageism czar could address problems described previously in this article that contribute to negative age stereotypes by seeking to: (a) enable the Federal Trade Commission to prosecute the anti-aging industry for its false advertising based on negative age stereotypes; (b) facilitate contacts between age groups by stipulating that housing complexes using federal funding must have an intergenerational component; and (c) help prevent subtle discriminatory practices in hiring by having the Department of Labor provide bonuses to companies that hire older workers for a specified number of years. As an example of other favorable actions the czar could take: because age stereotypes are first assimilated in childhood (e.g., Kwong See et al., 2012; Levy, 2009), the Department of Education could be required to expand its Core Curriculum, covering kindergarten through high school, to include readings that provide positive depictions of the old.
In tandem with potential efforts by the anti-ageism czar to counteract negative age stereotypes, a bottom-up approach is needed in the form of a social movement. This aging-rights movement could usefully adopt strategies of social movements that have gained rights for other groups. It would require three stages: collective identification, mobilization, and confrontation.
The goal of the collective-identification stage would be to instill “cognitive liberation,” which occurs when individuals move from accepting the conditions of stigmatization to challenging them (McAdam, 1982). An effective way of achieving this state is through pinpointing grievances. In the past, articulating grievances has been pivotal for social movements, including the women’s-rights movement, which began with the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, a list of grievances, that set the stage for the campaign to win their right to vote (Faulkner, 2016), and the disability-rights movement that began its campaign for fair treatment with grievances that included the negative stereotypes directed at disabled individuals (Grue, 2016).
Grievances of the aging-rights movement could be gathered through personal narratives presented by older individuals on the internet about everyday encounters with negative age stereotypes and ageism. The narrative has been shown to provide a means by which “people come to see themselves as a group with stakes in protest”; consequently, narratives can act as “collective action frames” (Polletta & Gardner, 2015, pp. 535, 596).
In addition to narratives, the grievances could be strengthened by presenting relevant research findings in an accessible way. Specifically, these findings could include evidence of the psychological, physical, and economic damage that can be caused by negative age stereotypes and ageism (e.g., Butler, 2010; Levy, 2009; Levy et al., 2016; Palmore, 2016).
Mobilization, the goal of the second stage of the aging-rights movement, would entail training a network of leaders to bring the message (i.e., both the grievances and the social-change aims) of the aging-rights movement to the largest possible audience. A successful approach to dissemination was demonstrated by the Highlander Folk School, an activist training center that was established in the Appalachian Mountains by Myles Horton. It drew on grievances to mobilize leaders of the civil rights movement, among them Rosa Parks, who attended the Highlander Folk School four months before she launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man (Morris, 1984).
A guiding principle of Horton was that rather than impose an agenda on a social movement from outside the aggrieved group, the experiences of its members should inform its agenda (Morris, 1984). Accordingly, he explained that “Not as individuals, but the group as a whole has much of the knowledge that they need to know to solve their problems. If they only knew how to analyze what their experiences were, what they know, and generalize them...they would begin to draw on their own resources” (Morris, 1984, p. 142). To operationalize this approach, Horton considered it important for the social-change leaders who were trained at his School to return to their communities to train other leaders (Tuckett, 2015). A network of centers, each equivalent to the Highlander Folk School, could potentially enable cadres of older individuals to energize and expand participation in the aging-rights movement.
The third stage of the movement, confrontation, would involve drawing on one of its greatest assets: the spending and voting power of the older community. By concentrating both the economic and electoral capacity of its participants into blocks, the movement would have formidable leverage. As an illustration, if the movement targeted the negative-age-stereotypical portrayal of older characters on television (e.g, Donlon, Ashman, & Levy, 2005) and the presentation of these stereotypes on social media in ways that enter the realm of hate speech (e.g., Levy, Chung, Bedford, & Navrazhina, 2014), it could buttress these efforts with boycotts of advertisers. In a parallel project, the voting blocks could be activated on behalf of political candidates supporting legislation that curtails the operation of negative age stereotypes and ageism.
The confrontation stage would be enhanced by incorporating a public-education campaign designed to challenge unfounded assumptions that contribute to negative age stereotypes. The campaign would be aimed at individuals of all ages. To reduce the possibility of young adults reacting against the movement, the campaign could include the message that they will not be disadvantaged by its goals. Indeed, the overall aims of the movement, to mitigate negative age stereotypes and bolster positive age stereotypes, could be presented as a long-term gain for them.
One way that the public-education campaign could disseminate its message would be through the arts, a medium that has been successfully implemented by other social movements (Eyerman, 2015). As an example, this could entail an expansion of the “dance-flash mobs” that have infrequently appeared in public spaces with participants ranging in age from the teens through the eighties, in order to create a dance performance that “shatters commonly held stereotypes about aging” (Marsh, 2014).
It would be advantageous to include the young in the confrontation stage of the movement in order to demonstrate that its goals have broad support and to increase the likelihood that they will be implemented. Nonetheless, it would be appropriate for older individuals to hold the leadership positions, so that the movement remained indigenous to the older community. In this way, the movement would not only provide an opportunity to assert and potentially achieve demands, the ability to organize could help dispel the negative age stereotype of dependency, and replace it with an image of empowered older individuals.
Conclusion
The age-stereotype paradox is a social construct; therefore, dismantling it will require a societal effort. This needs the two-prong approach, with the joint goals of reinforcing conditions that promote positive age stereotypes and attenuating conditions that promote negative age stereotypes. By adopting these goals, the top-down and bottom-up interventions proposed in this article could perhaps reverse the historic trend of increasing age-stereotype negativity. At that point, there will no longer be a gap between the expected and actual trends of age-stereotype positivity, so the paradox would vanish.
Funding
The preparation of this paper was supported by a grant from AARP.
This paper was published as part of a supplement sponsored and funded by AARP. The statements and opinions expressed herein by the authors are for information, debate, and discussion, and do not necessarily represent official policies of AARP.
