Becca Levy, a psychologist at the Yale School of Public Health, has been measuring the impact of stereotypes about old age for close to 20 years. They have potent effects, she and her colleagues have found.
The researchers developed an “image of aging” scale to determine whether subjects are likely to see old people as “capable” and “active” and “full of life,” or as “grumpy” or “helpless” or other negative attributes. They’ve used the scale to measure how much those descriptions match older people’s own self-perceptions.
Over and over, they’ve found that those who hold more positive age stereotypes behave differently as they age from those with more negative stereotypes, even when the groups are similar in other ways, including health status.
Older people with more positive views of aging do better on memory tests. They have better handwriting. They can walk faster. They’re more likely to recover fully from severe disability. Those with more positive self-perceptions of aging actually live longer, by an average of 7.5 years. (Other kinds of stereotypes, about race and gender, have also been found to influence behavior.)
But can you help older people to acquire those positive views? In their latest study, Dr. Levy and her colleagues tried to strengthen positive age stereotypes and make them last, and then see what effect they had on physical strength.
Negative stereotypes about age (like those groan-worthy insurance ads about an older woman who can’t quite seem to grasp the Internet) are of course rampant. “Children as young as 3 or 4 have already taken them in,” Dr. Levy told me in an interview. “Then they’re repetitively reinforced.” By the time those preschoolers become old themselves, “they’ve had decades of exposure.”
Yet the researchers have now reported, in the journal Psychological Science, that an “implicit” intervention works subliminally to strengthen older people’s positive age stereotypes. That leads, in turn, to stronger physical functioning. The effects were still evident three weeks after the intervention ended.
Here’s how it worked with a group of 100 older adults (average age 81) living New Haven, Conn. Once a week over four weeks, these volunteers were exposed to what’s sometimes called an “implicit association” exercise.
Some in the group saw positive words associated with aging — like wise, creative, spry and fit, along with old and senior — flashed on a laptop screen so briefly that while the brain registered them, people couldn’t tell what they said. “Perception without awareness,” as Dr. Levy put it. The sessions lasted about 15 minutes. Other subjects engaged in an “explicit” exercise, in which they were asked to write brief essays about active older people. The researchers controlled for age, sex and health.
As expected, follow-up tests showed that the implicit intervention significantly strengthened positive age stereotypes and self-perceptions of age. Then, one week and three weeks after the final session, participants were given physical tasks: repeatedly standing up from a chair and sitting down, walking across a room, holding poses that challenge balance.
The group exposed to implicit positive messages showed significant improvement in physical function, compared to their status before the experiment began. Those who participated in the explicit intervention and wrote essays showed no improvement.
In fact, the people who underwent four brief exposures to implicit positive messages showed greater physical improvement than a group of a similar aged, enrolled in a different study, that actually exercised for six months.
In earlier studies, using a one-time experience, the researchers had influenced aging stereotypes for perhaps an hour. This is the first time they’ve been able to show that such influences may last, and have physical effects, for weeks.
The implicit approach may have more impact than explicitly positive messages, Dr. Levy said, because it thwarts resistance. “People have encountered negative stereotypes for so long, in media and marketing and everyday conversations, that people build up ways to hold onto them,” she said. “Implicit interventions can bypass that.”
I’m wondering how long such results might last — a few months? a year or two? — and whether participants might need periodic tuneups, re-exposure to the implicit messages. Nobody knows yet.
I’m also wondering what social scientists might do with this knowledge. Should swathes of the population, at all ages, be exposed to implicit sessions that boost their positive stereotypes of age? I could imagine them embedded (with permission) in movies or video games or flashing on our cellphones. (I’d be interested in your ideas.)
Thought manipulation can sound fairly creepy, but aren’t age stereotypes also a form of thought manipulation? And creepy?