Unintentional Ageism

Last week, my car was in the shop and my husband drove me to work and came at the end of the day to pick me up. One of my coworkers, who hadn’t seen him in a while, spotted him walking out of the building with me and shouted, “Sara’s husband!” We both laughed, and she said “I just can’t remember your name. Must be because I’m old.” This example shows her negatively stereotyping herself, which I’m sure was unintentional. She wrongfully assumed that the reason she couldn’t remember his name was because she’s over 60—even though the real reason is that she hadn’t used his name in a while. But, she didn’t need to use it. Everyone experiences this, no matter their age. Most of the time, this sort of thing just happens. We know we know the person and we know we know the name, we just can’t get to it in the moment—we’ll get it later. This comes mostly from infrequent or non-recent use.

Interestingly, the assumption that memory fails us just because we are older is widespread, pervasive, and impacts everyone who believes it. It can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a study by Dr. Tamara Rahhal and colleagues, data showed that the way we think about memory can impact memory performance itself. In this study, researchers asked older adults to either “remember information” or “learn something new.” In reality, both tasks were the same—and involved remembering. However, those who had the task framed as a memory task did poorly—because they believed the stereotype of older adults’ bad memory and internalized it. This is counterproductive, untrue, and entirely unhelpful. And it doesn’t just lead to incorrect assumptions but can also cause us to discriminate against an older adult based on abilities that we think they no longer have, even if they are just fine in that ability.

Moving forward without assumptions about a particular group, like older adults, might be difficult, though. The reason we hold these types of assumptions is because it is mentally easier to think about a whole group of people in one way than it is to think individually about each person within that group. That’s to say it isn’t intentionally malicious, but it clearly does influence us. And those effects can be marginalizing, hurtful, discriminatory, and just plain wrong… about others and about ourselves.

Instead, we should make the attempt to learn about each individual person—the least of whom should be ourselves. We should understand how we, as individuals, work and how our abilities either coincide with or contradict the stereotype we hold. And we should be aware (though this won’t eliminate them entirely) that the stereotypes might just be inaccurate.

We could also make the attempt to learn the truth about aging (this is my personal mission—to share these truths), to see that the research often does not support the beliefs we hold either. And that is ok too. But, learning means growing. We can learn new things, grow our knowledge, and change our expectations—and this should result in fewer instances of unintentional ageism.