What do the young (old) people think of me? Content and accuracy of age-based metastereotypes

Abstract

Increasing age diversity in the workforce points to the need to understand the dynamics of interpersonal relations across age groups. An important element of these interactions involves interpersonal perceptions, including both what an individual believes about members of other age groups (stereotypes) and what individuals believe other age groups think of their own group (metastereotypes). We explore the content and accuracy of the stereotypes and metastereotypes in a sample of 247 younger, middle-aged, and older workers. We compare the stereotypes and metastereotypes of and by different groups in terms of their affective valence (positive/negative) and compare the results produced by open-ended and closed-ended methods. We map out the usefulness of these data for future work towards enhancing cross-aged interactions in the workplace.

Keywords:

• Age stereotypes
• Ageing and work
• Metastereotypes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Kristina Matarazzo, Sara Johnson, Lily Patel, Julie Unite, Erica Blitstein, Jennifer Hajicek, and Kayla Hernandez for their assistance with the content analysis of our qualitative data.

Notes

¹We collected exploratory data as part of our current survey to explore the veracity of these boundaries in the opinions of our participants. These data are discussed further later in this article.

²An additional table of every descriptive category and the number of times it was mentioned by each group is available from the first author upon request.