The Influence Of Aging On Outgroup Stereotypes: The Mediating Role Of Cognitive And Motivational Facets Of Deficient Flexibility

Abstract

Background/Study Context: The current study was designed to examine previously reported findings about age-related changes in drawing stereotypic inferences; specifically, that older adults are more likely than younger adults to stereotype outgroup members. The study replicates previous research and extends it by exploring the cognitive and motivational facets of deficient flexibility underlying this effect and comparing stereotypes towards ingroup and outgroup members.

Methods: In the experiment, younger and older adults read stories that allowed for stereotypic inferences. They also completed the Trail Making Test (TMT) and Need for Closure Scale (NFC) as cognitive and motivational measures of deficient flexibility.

Results: The results of the experiment revealed that, compared to younger participants, older adults were more likely to rely upon stereotypic inferences when they read a story about outgroup members; however, there were no age-group differences in using stereotypes when they read a story about ingroup members. In addition, the findings showed that making more stereotypical inferences by older versus younger adults in relation to outgroup members was mediated by cognitive (TMT) and motivational (NFC) facets of deficient flexibility.

Conclusion: A major implication of these findings is that both cognitive and motivational facets of deficient flexibility contribute to the reliance of older adults on stereotypes compared with younger adults. However, this is only true when older adults process information about outgroup members, but not about ingroup members. Thus, the current research goes beyond previous results by providing direct evidence that ingroup-outgroup perception contributes to stereotyping among older participants.

ORCID

Gabriela Czarnek

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4152-3580

Notes

¹ We use the term “facets” similarly to how it is applied in the faceted models in intelligence (Süß & Beauducel, 2005) or as facets of symptoms (von Hecker, Sedek, & Brzezicka, 2013); that is, as the hypothesis of correspondence between definitions and sets of observations. This facet design enables us to examine various aspects of the studied phenomenon.

² As noted before, this is a quite different operationalization of the situation-model representation in the stereotypic condition than that used recently by Radvansky et al. (2010).

³ Preliminary analyses of the other two forms of written text representation (i.e., surface level and textbase level) did not yield any statistically significant results; neither the main effect of age nor the interaction of age with any of the other independent variables was significant.

⁴ The research of Carstensen and associates (Carstensen, 2006; Reed & Carstensen, 2012; see also Sedek et al., 2014) showed the important role of affect regulation across the adult life span. The preliminary analysis 2 (age: younger vs. older adults; between subjects) × 2 (affect: positive vs. negative affect; within subjects) on standardized subscales of PANAS showed only the main effect of age, p < .001 (the main effect of affect and interaction effect were nonsignificant). Hence, the younger adults showed stronger intensity of both positive and negative affect in comparison with older adults. Consequently, the mean affect intensity was subsequently used as the covariate in the double mediation path analysis. It, however, turned out to be insignificant.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grant DEC 2011/02/A/HS6/00155 from the National Science Center, awarded to Małgorzata Kossowska, and by the Mistrz Programme (Grzegorz Sedek, Foundation for Polish Science).