Title: Activation of Aging Stereotypes in Younger and Older Adults | The Journals of Gerontology: Series B | Oxford Academic
Headings: The Activation of Aging Stereotypes in Younger and Older Adults
The Activation of Aging Stereotypes in Younger and Older Adults
Published:
Abstract
Issue Section:
Methods
Overview
Participants and Design
Stimuli
Procedure
Results
Explicit Aging Attitude Measure
Implicit Measure
Age-Based Stereotyping
Age-Based Prejudice
Discussion
Automatic Stereotyping
Automatic Prejudice
Appendix
Notes
References

Content: Perdue and Gurtman concluded from these results that there is an automatic ageism that influences the way people process trait information. Hence, subliminal presentation of the word old facilitated the processing of negative trait information, and subliminal presentation of the word young facilitated the processing of positive information. Perdue and Gurtman suggested that labeling a person as old could automatically activate primarily negative constructs that might then be applied in evaluating that individual. Unfortunately, the interpretation of this study is hampered by Perdue and Gurtman's (1990) selection of personality traits. Intending to examine age-based prejudice, the authors selected extremely positive or negative traits from Anderson's (1968) list of trait valence ratings, but did not consider the issue of trait stereotypicality (i.e., trait descriptiveness). As a result, their stimulus set overrepresented positive traits that have been shown to be more descriptive of younger adults than older adults (e.g., studious, tolerant). Conversely, their set of negative traits overrepresented traits that have been shown to be more descriptive of older adults (e.g., stubborn, forgetful). Because of this confound of valence and stereotypicality, it is unclear whether Perdue and Gurtman's (1990) findings are due solely to age-based prejudice, to the differential stereotypicality of the selected positive (young) and negative (old