Assumptions about older people: Class discussion

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about aging. Several years ago, I had a friend in her 80s tell me that internally she didn’t feel any different than she did when she was in her 40s. While I’m gaining distance from my 40s but still quite a ways away from my 80s, I understand what she was telling me. I feel no different today than I did when I was in my 40s, and I don’t see that changing. What I do see changing is how others interact with the me that they I assume I am.

My wife read Becca Levy’s 2022 book Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live and highly recommended it. The late career and retired educators affinity group through the Society for the Teaching of Psychology has had two synchronous meetings this year, and our discussions prompted me to pick up Levy’s book.

When I mentioned to a colleague that we should spend more time in Intro Psych talking about late adulthood, they said that that wasn’t necessary since late adulthood was so far away from where our typical college student is now. First, I taught in community colleges for over 30 years. I had many students who were deep into their 50s and older. This was not a hypothetical stage of life for them. Second, younger people interact with older people all the time—older relatives, older neighbors, older co-workers, plus older strangers on public transit, in restaurants, and in stores. Most importantly, younger people need to know that the first person who calls me “young lady” is going to get punched in the face. Okay, that’s unlikely. I’ve never hit anyone and am unlikely to start, but they need to know that I will really, really want to punch them in the face. But I’m ahead of myself.

Becca Levy teaches a Health and Aging course. She reports that she begins the course “by asking [her] students to think of an older person and list the first five words or phrases that come to mind. It can be someone real or imagined” (Levy, 2022, p. 9). What a great way to open a discussion on late adulthood in the Intro Psych lifespan chapter! Once your students have their lists, do as Levy does and ask your students to tally up how many of their items were positive and how many were negative. Next, invite students to work in small groups to identify how they may have developed their ideas about older adults. Once discussion dies down, ask a volunteer from each group to share where their ideas may have come from.

There are a number of factors that influence our perceptions of older adults (Gire, 2019). Largely, it comes down to who we see and what we hear. For example, if we live with an older adult who is physically and socially active, we are more likely to assume older adults, in general, are physically and socially active. Similarly, if our primary exposure to messages about aging comes from social media or mass media, then our attitudes are more likely to reflect those messages.

How we think about others certainly influences how we interact with them. However, the interesting thing about aging is that with some luck, we will become a member of that aged group. The next post in this series will explore the stereotype embodiment theory which describes how our beliefs about age affect our own health.

References

Gire, J. T. (2019). Cultural variations in perceptions of aging. In K. D. Keith (Ed.), Cross‐Cultural Psychology (pp. 216–240). Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119519348.ch8

Levy, B. (2022). Breaking the age code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long & well you live (First edition). William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.