Older is wiser? It depends who you ask… and how you ask

ABSTRACT

Interacting with older adults can trigger a number of stereotypes. Negative stereotypes tend to dominate, but a persistent positive perception of aging in the popular psyche is that age brings wisdom. Despite this common belief, previous research suggests that the relationship between age and wisdom is weak and inconsistent. We propose that this is due to opposing perceptions of aging – gains in life experience and socioemotional skills, counteracted by declines in cognitive skill – that also vary with characteristics of the perceiver and the context. We investigated these paradoxical perceptions of aging by asking younger (aged 20–40) and older (aged 60–80) adult judges to rate adult speakers (aged 30–89) on the basis of their responses to three narrative prompts. Several aspects of wisdom were judged, including those related to cognitive skills, and those related to socioemotional aspects of wisdom. We examined the impact on ratings of speaker and rater characteristics, as well as the interaction of these characteristics with the dimension being rated. Findings showed that the wisdom ratings were higher for speakers with better verbal fluency, and that the relationship between age and perceived wisdom was moderated by the speaker’s gender. Consistent with prior work, speaker age (relative to rater’s age) had a negative effect on cognitive aspects of wisdom, but a positive effect on socio-affective aspects of wisdom. Implications for understanding age-related stereotypes and conceptions of wisdom are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Aging
• language
• speaker evaluation
• stereotypes
• wisdom

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the encouragement and intellectual stimulation provided by the Wisdom Research Network at the University of Chicago, and the invaluable research assistance of many students and research assistants.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this project was provided by a grant from the University of Chicago’s Defining Wisdom Project and the John Templeton Foundation.