Susceptibility and Resilience to Memory Aging Stereotypes: Education Matters More than Age

Abstract

The authors examined whether the memory performance of young, middle-aged, and older adults would be influenced by stereotype versus counterstereotype information about age differences on a memory task. One hundred forty-nine adults from a probability sample were randomly assigned to a control group or to age-stereotype conditions. As predicted, counterstereotype information was related to higher recall compared to stereotype and control groups. This was true across all age groups, but only for those with more education. Both stereotype and counterstereotype information were related to lower recall compared to the control group across age groups for those with lower education. Results suggest those with more education are more resilient when faced with negative age stereotypes about memory and respond positively to counterstereotype information. In contrast, those with less education show greater susceptibility to the detrimental effects of age stereotypes and respond negatively to both stereotype and counterstereotype information about memory aging.

This research was funded by grants T32AG00204-10 and R01 AG17920 from the National Institute on Aging. This article is based in part on the doctoral dissertation of the first author supervised by the second author. The authors appreciate the assistance of Ilana Blatt-Eisengart with data collection and analysis. The authors thank the other dissertation committee members Nalini Ambady, Art Wingfield, and Leslie Zebrowitz, for their contribution to this work. They also thank Leslie Zebrowitz and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript.

Notes

¹A total of 156 people initially participated in the study; however, 4 were excluded due to poor reading skills, which made it too difficult for them to complete the tasks, 2 refused to complete the word list recall task, and data from 1 participant were lost due to experimenter error.

Note. DSS = digit symbol substitution; FDS = forward digit span; BDS = backward digit span; L1 = first word list; L2 = second word list. For education: 1 = some grade school; 8 = 2-year college degree; 12 = doctoral level degree.

²Intellectual efficacy and control beliefs were measured with the Personality in Intellectual Contexts Inventory (PIC) (Lachman, 1986; Lachman, Baltes, Nesselroade, & Willis, 1982) which was completed by participants prior to their scheduled testing session. Three scales from the PIC (internal, chance, powerful others) were averaged to create a composite measure of intellectual control beliefs (standardized alpha = .89). Participants indicated the extent to which they agreed with each statement on a Likert-type scale (1 = strongly agree, 6 = strongly disagree). Items were reverse scored so that a higher score is indicative of greater control. An Age Group (3) × Condition (3) × Education (2) ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of education, F(1, 129) = 11.99, p = .001. Those with more education reported a greater sense of control (M = 5.03, SD = .69) than did their less educated peers (M = 4.60, SD = .72). There were no other significant main effects or interactions.