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It can be argued that society is successfully tackling racism and sexism amongst other forms of prejudice. Well, in terms of the acceptability of explicitly expressed opinions at least. But what about ageism? Why has this remained immune to the societal drivers of change?
Older people are often portrayed as frail, forgetful and doddery but why do we not challenge these negative stereotypes as they represent only the minority of older adults in society today. In the media, older adults are frequently referred to as pensioners but when is a 30-something ever referred to as a salaried person? As a society we have fallen into traps, using heuristics and negative stereotypes to categorise older adults; but why? As a white British male, it is unlikely in the UK that I will encounter the same prejudices as a South Asian immigrant female. However, should I have the good fortune to live long enough I will potentially face the same age related discrimination and prejudice regardless of gender, race or nationality. With this being the case, why do we as a society not quash ageism? Some research suggests that we try to marginalise older people and create an ‘out-group’, maximising the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In doing this we maximise the positive attributes we associate with our youth ‘in-group’ and apply the opposite attributes to the aged ‘out-group’. Youth is still seen as the ultimate drive and goal, fueling the beauty and cosmetics sector, implicitly reinforcing this artificial barrier and the negative attributes associated with age. Further this acceptance is reinforced through comedy, through the medical model of ageing and the limited intergenerational contact experienced by most people. We are at a paradoxical juncture, extolling the virtues of wisdom yet deprecating the facets of age.
Ageism has many negative consequences. For the older adult, internalised ageism acquired through the lifecourse and from direct experience of prejudice can decrease physical and emotional wellbeing, increase incidence of depression and facilitate the withdrawal from community engagement. From a wider perspective, ageism robs society of a huge experiential resource as well as a pool of informal carers, volunteers and increases social and healthcare costs. As with other forms of prejudice, there are no benefits and many of the stereotypes it is based on are simply untrue. As gerontologists we are aware of the underlying opportunities associated with the ageing process and the contributions made by older adults. Through research and wider engagement we should be facilitating debate and challenging the assumptions associated with ageing. Fact: We are all ageing. Fact: Society as a whole is ageing. This is something we should embrace rather than run from. Through education and exposure we can help readdress the balance and set the score right and maybe, just maybe, we can turn the stigma associated with being old into the stigma of being ageist.
Ageing Issues 
My PhD was about ageism in the workplace, and the most convincing explanation I found for ageism generally was the ‘Integrated Threat’ approach to prejudice (Stephan & Stephan, 2000). A perceived threat can be a (real or imagined) threat to an individual’s, or society’s, economic well being, health, moral values, amongst other facets of life. The literature differentiates between ‘realistic threat’ (e.g. a genuine threat posed by a risk of catching a disease such as AIDS, Ebola, etc.) and ‘symbolic threat’ e.g. a risk of challenge to moral values, or accepted beliefs current in a society.
While obviously we can’t ‘catch’ ageing, and with luck most people will live to collect their pensions, there is some evidence that contact with the oldest old does create a sense of threat, of the form ‘I could be like that one day’. This explanation does not work with ageism against what we might call the older middle-aged, such as is seen in workplace ageism. There the threat and hence the prejudice derives more from a concern (again, based on inaccurate stereotypes) that the older worker will be less productive because physically or mentally slower, less up to date with the latest IT, out of date on current practice, etc. There is no doubt: on average people do slow down slightly as they reach the higher age groups, but the work of McIntosh and colleagues at Toronto and McMaster universities suggests that due to brain plasticity, older people’s actual performance on cognitive tasks is not affected, and it is highly doubtful whether, for most occupations, any slowing down has relevant impact on the performance of workplace duties. (It might be different if an older person wanted to be a jet fighter pilot or astronaut!) And of course, being out of date on IT and procedures is easily dealt with via training – but, other research shows that older workers are much less likely to be sent for such training (e.g. McDowall, 2007) as they are considered less likely to show ‘return on investment’. A vicious circle indeed.
Of course, such prejudices can be self-fulfilling, as the ‘Stereotype Threat’ literature shows that if people are labelled as being less likely to succeed at a task, guess what? They ARE less likely to succeed (e.g. Chasteen et al, 2005). Which only reinforces the negative stereotypes.
What to do? Development of Allport’s ‘contact’ approach to reducing prejudice indicates that contact with the targets of prejudice, such as engaging in joint tasks towards an agreed goal, can reduce prejudice. In the context of ageism, this could mean workplaces employing a wide range of ages and trying to form teams with mixed age groups. This would depend on the employers’ either being unprejudiced enough to employ the older people, or being conscious of, and willing to tackle, their prejudices. Quite a big ask. In wider society, contact with older people may lead to reinforcement of prejudice, perhaps due to the attribution error (an older driver being slow to move off when the traffic light goes green does so because s/he is older therefore doddery, but a younger one distracted talking to their passenger? Well, that’s just life); or due to some kind of health or even existential threat (e.g. ‘Am I really going to look that wrinkled when I’m 80?’)
Discrimination on age grounds is now illegal in many areas of society, but it still happens; like gender and racial prejudice, it merely stays hidden. Easier to claim that an older person lacks the right qualifications, than to admit to age prejudice. Admired older people are often so because they bely the usual prejudice( ‘she doesn’t look her age’, or ‘climbing the Eiger at his age?’ ) not because they have achievements which could be thought of as ‘age-appropriate’.
There clearly isn’t an easy solution, and perhaps a solution will never be found, but in the meantime older people’s lives can perhaps be made more pleasant by enforcing the anti-discrimination laws, and by cultivating older role models not because they look or act younger than they are, but because they are valuable members of society because of their age, experience, wisdom and so on. In recent years, Nelson Mandela has been one such, and so is Queen Elizabeth II. Maybe we ordinary older people will just have to wait.
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Reblogged this on intergenerational.
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