An empirical study of ageism: From polemics to scientific utility

Abstract

Ageism has been a poorly defined polemical term covering a range of discriminatory attitudes and behaviours directed toward elderly people. Based on data from 195 1st-year psychology students, this study measures four facets of ageism—attitudes to the elderly, attitudes to the ageing process, stereotypes of capability and stereotypes of sociability—and relates scale scores to experimental findings on age discrimination. The study shows interconnectedness among components of ageism, but considerable diversity in how ageist the group was on different dimensions. The major finding was that while both attitudinal and experimental designs were effective in uncovering biases against elderly people, these biases were unrelated to each other. Ageism, defined in terms of verbally expressed prejudice and stereotypes, is to be distinguished from age discrimination, operationalised as a preference for younger over older job applicants.