Sunny Side Up: The Reliance on Positive Age Stereotypes in Descriptions of Future Older Selves

Abstract

This research investigates processes underlying selective self-stereotyping in the context of a future group membership. In two studies a narrative coding methodology allowed us to investigate the spontaneous use of positive and negative stereotypic content in young adults' descriptions of future aged selves. In Study 1, young adults relied more on positive than negative age stereotypes to construct older possible selves. In Study 2, participants asked to describe a feared aged self continued to evidence a positivity bias, such that their descriptions were more often characterized by concerns about missing out on or failing to attain positive age-related experiences than by concerns about negative events stereotypic of older adulthood. This pattern suggests that positivity biases underlying selective self-stereotyping operate at both stereotype activation and application stages of information processing.

Keywords:

• Aging
• Positivity bias
• Self-stereotyping
• Stereotype activation

This research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council awarded to A. Chasteen and D. Packer as well as an Ontario Graduate Scholarship awarded to J. Remedios.

We are grateful to Kaitlin Laidlaw and Darko Odic for helping to code the narratives and to the rest of the Adult Development Lab for their assistance with data collection.

Notes

1. Hummert et al. (1994) asked young, middle-aged and older adults to sort traits into groups by putting the traits which would be observed in the same elderly person into one pile. Participants from all three age-groups created impaired, despondent, shrew and recluse negative subcategories. Only young adults produced a vulnerable subcategory. Because we were interested in how young adults applied stereotypes about aging to descriptions of their future aged self, we included the vulnerable subcategory in our content analyses.

2. Overall, there were 111 words in the 5 negative stereotype dictionaries (impaired = 37, despondent = 13, shrew = 30, recluse = 18 and vulnerable = 13). There were 110 words in the 3 positive stereotype dictionaries (golden = 60, grandparent = 36, conservative = 14). As such, any differences we might observe between the use of positive versus negative stereotypes was not due to differences in the size of their respective word pools.

3. Because written passages are largely comprised of words unrelated to content (e.g., pronouns, prepositions), it is not unusual to observe relatively low percentages of words related to target content categories (e.g., Pennebaker, Mayne, & Francis, 1997). Importantly, despite the relatively low overall rates of stereotype word use in the current study, statistical comparisons identified meaningful variation in terms of how frequently individuals used words from one category versus another when describing their possible selves. (Also please note that LIWC analyses effectively control for word count because this software reports specific content in terms of percentage of total content, i.e., words of interest/total words in each passage).

4. For passages in which stereotype content was present, we further coded narratives for the presence or absence of content in an affirmative, negative and neutral direction. As a result, passages that did not contain positive stereotypic content in the negative direction did not, by necessity, contain positive stereotypic content in the positive direction.