Ageism Essay

Ageism is a prejudice whereby people are categorized and judged solely on the basis off their chronological age. “Stereotyping causes ageism to become a social disease, a lot like racism and sexism causing great fear, waste, illness, and misery (Palmore 2005, p.90). Effects of ageism can lead older people to feeling embarrassed and depressed. Most people who are 70 or older think they are doing better than other people their age are, who have worse problems in their mind. If an elder forgets something they may call it a “senior moment.” In an ageist culture, you are being self-protected when you think you feel younger than your actual age. In the classic study with Levy and Langer in 1994, a memory test was given to groups of Chinese, deaf Americans, and hearing Americans. Elders in all three groups scored lower than the younger people. When older people believe themselves to be independent, they are more likely to be healthier mentally and physically (Berger, p.500-501).
With the “Attribution, the Attractiveness Stereotype, and the Elderly” experiment, the purpose was to see how young and older people viewed the attractiveness of older people. The goal of this research was to see how both young and old people saw the physical attractiveness of older people. There were photographs of twenty-eight white women ages 60-93 and twenty-eight white men ages 60-89. The volunteers who chose to show their pictures represented a variety of physical features. The pictures were a front view of the face from the neck up. Ratings for attractiveness were very similar for the old and young raters. Neither perceived nor actual age is strongly associated with judged attractiveness. Young raters had r=.12 and for older raters, r=.03. There was grea...

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...ent. (Hale, 1998) A constraint of this research design is that there were only fifty participants for each age group. Fifty is not that much when you consider the entire population of the United States. Future research could investigate the degree that older people experience low levels of contact identify with other older people.
Research showed that the younger populations are not the only people who stereotype the older generations. Older people find it harder to identify themselves with each other because it is more socially acceptable to apart of a younger social group. They do not like to think that they have negative stereotypes placed upon them. But if young and older people work together to make a more positive influence on how people view the elderly, older people may feel more comfortable with themselves and keep an upbeat personality.