Age and forgetfulness: Perceivers' impressions of targets' capability.

Abstract

In a person perception paradigm, 72 young and 72 old adult Ss listened to tape recordings of a nonforgetful, moderately forgetful, or highly forgetful female target person being interviewed for a volunteer job. Ss then rated their opinion of the target's memory and how likely they would be to assign the target to easy and difficult tasks. Overall, Ss gave higher memory opinion ratings to old than to young targets. As expected, they were more likely to assign tasks to nonforgetful than to forgetful targets. However, they were more egalitarian than was hypothesized in their task assignment ratings for forgetful young versus forgetful old targets.

Age and forgetfulness: The effect of implicit priming

“…During the interview the target either failed to remember various items of information (e.g., her social security number, the interviewer's name) or forgot nothing. Erber et al (1992) found that forgetfulness was clearly salient in perceivers' judgments about about the target's cognitive capability: Perceivers were less likely to assign tasks of varying difficulty to forgetful targets than to nonforgetful targets, thus confirming that memory is considered an important part of cognitive capability. However, contrary to the expected outcome that forgetful old targets would be judged more harshly, Erber et al (1992) found that perceivers were no less likely to assign tasks to forgetful old than to forgetful young targets.…”

“…To test this hypothesis, Erber, Etheart, and Szuchman (1992) had perceivers listen to a tape recording of a young or old female target being interviewed for a school volunteer position. During the interview the target either failed to remember various items of information (e.g., her social security number, the interviewer's name) or forgot nothing.…”

The dynamics of warmth and competence judgments, and their outcomes in organizations

“…Age stereotypes can lead to organizational discrimination through confirmation biases. For example, when an older person fails to remember something, perceivers attribute the memory failure to intellectual incompetence, whereas the same failure by a younger adult is viewed as a temporary lapse due to inattention (Erber & Prager, 1999;Erber et al, 1992Erber et al, , 1993Erber et al, , 1996. Within organizations, older employees are viewed as less effective than younger employees in various job-related tasks (Avolio & Barrett, 1987;Rosen & Jerdee, 1976a,b;Singer, 1986).…”

Designing Mobile Phone Interfaces for Age Diversity in South Africa: “One-World” versus Diverse “Islands”

“…Fortunately, Caspi reports that inter-age contact serves to reduce stereotype-like attitudes [13]. Moreover, ensuring that individuals from two distinct groups interact has been shown to reduce stereotypical characteristic attributions [14]. Thus, if we incorporate inter-generational contact, on a one-to-one basis, into the study, we can reduce the stereotyping effect.…”