Can stories change how we feel about older people? The effect of older people’s online personal stories on mitigating younger Korean’s ageism

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to explore whether personal stories told by older people online can be used to alleviate ageist attitudes among young people in South Korea. An experimental research design and survey were used to expose 318 respondents aged 18–35 to photographs and documentary-like personal accounts of older people borrowed from a social media page. The analysis shows that exposure to personal narratives told by older people has some effect in mitigating younger people’s ageist attitudes, with respondents who read stories told by older people showing lower ageism than those who read stories told by storytellers with no information about their age. The stories were more effective in reducing respondents’ emotional bias as compared to their impact on cognitive bias, predicted by the likability of a story. The findings corroborate media theories that suggest more hospitable online spaces and stories echoing older people’s voices. Education that exposes younger people to these contents may help to reduce intergenerational tensions.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Robin Mansell for reviewing the draft of this paper and encouraging me throughout every process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In November 2021, the approximate number of results on Google Scholar search with using the keyword racism was were 1,980,000, sexism 454,000, and while for ageism, it was 89,800.

2. The pictures were used after conducting a pilot study asking 10 Koreans the perceived age of the subject in the photograph.

3. Recent studies highlight there is no statistical justification for using the p-value of 0.05 (Wasserstein & Lazar, 2016), and it would be a mistake to conclude that there is no evidence of effect or no association when p > 0.05 (Greenland et al., 2016).