The Effect of Age-Stigma Concealment on Social Evaluations

Abstract

Many older adults try to avoid age discrimination by hiding visible signs of aging. But using cosmetic procedures to conceal one’s age also incurs negative evaluations. This paradox prompted us to ask whether people can detect age concealment and, if so, whether they would either negatively evaluate concealers due to age-concealment stigmas or positively evaluate concealers because they look better. Across four studies with targets who underwent age-concealment procedures, we found that people could detect age concealment. Although people negatively evaluated concealers when thinking about them abstractly, they favored concealers over nonconcealers if they saw photos of them. Moreover, seeing photos of concealers improved subsequent evaluations of new concealers. The visual benefits of age-stigma concealment may therefore attenuate its stigma.

Notes

Notes

1 The current work uses the terms “concealers” and “nonconcealers” to refer to the before and after photos of age-stigma concealers, respectively. However, we recognize that all targets are age-stigma concealers, in principle, and may differ from older adults who do not elect to undergo age-stigma concealment procedures.

2 Sampling techniques reflect the number of participants we could recruit from our university participant pool, given calendar (i.e., semester starts and finishes) and allotment limitations (i.e., caps on the number of participants available to our lab). In later studies, we recruited participants from an online participant pool that captured a wider age range, finding similar results for stigma detection accuracy and stigma perception; thus the results did not solely stem from age discrimination by young adult participants.

3 Indeed, more than 30% of the targets looked the same age or older following their procedure and we found a strong correlation between the targets’ perceived and actual ages both before, r(62) = .73, and after their procedures, r(62) = .76 (in other words, perceivers could identify the women’s ages in years with roughly 88% accuracy even after their procedures).

4 Considering that different impressions of pre-procedure and post-procedure targets could arise from differences in photo quality (i.e., lighting, image resolution, etc.), we asked additional participants to rate the quality of the photos; the pre-procedure (M = 4.00, SD = 1.05) and post-procedure photos (M = 3.90, SD = 1.14) did not differ, r_{effect size} = .18, and the findings of all studies remained the same when including photo quality as a covariate.

5 Although we had no hypotheses regarding potential gender differences, exploratory analyses revealed no consistent differences between male and female participants in any of our studies, and so we do not discuss them further.

6 Adjusted means controlled for affect. We found similar results when not adjusting for affect, r_{effect size} = .32.

7 We found similar results when not adjusting for affect, except that nonconcealers looked equally Vital as young adults (see Table S2 in the Supplemental Materials).

8 Most of these results remained consistent when not adjusting for affect (see Table S2 in Supplemental Materials). Notable differences included that concealers and nonconcealers appeared similar in age, r_{effect size} = .02, and that young-adult men appeared marginally more hirable than concealers, r_{effect size} = .12.