TITLE:
Priming with Age Stereotypes Influences the Performance of Elderly Workers
AUTHORS:
Christine Kirchner, Ina Völker, Otmar Leo Bock
KEYWORDS:
Stereotypes, Priming, Aging, Job Performance, Ecological Validity
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.6 No.2,
January
29,
2015
ABSTRACT: Studies have shown
that priming with negative age
stereotypes can degrade the performance of older adults on typical laboratory tasks. Here we evaluate
whether priming with positive age
stereotypes can improve performance on an ecologically
valid task, modelled after the subjects’ duties at work. Twenty healthy
employees (age: Ø 52.75 years; SD = 9.45) from the receiving department of a
wholesale company were primed with the scrambled sentence task. The
experimental group (n = 10) was primed with positive age stereotypes such as
“wise”. In the control group (n = 10) no age stereotypes were presented. Both
groups were subsequently tested with a delivery-verification task, in which the
contents of a parcel had to be checked against an invoice. The experimental
group completed the verification task within 4.31 minutes (SD = 2.22), and the
control group within 7.18 minutes (SD = 2.12). The difference was statistically
significant (t(18) = 2.8; p