Seniors portrayed as helpless victims

A common stereotype associated with the elders is that they are all helpless and or defenceless victims who are at risk of being attacked and easily scammed. These stereotypes portrayed in the media about the risk of being attacked or robbed, leaves our elders unable to get out of their comfort zone because they feel vulnerable. As Kristen discussed in this previous post on stereotype threats, the negative impact associated with stereotypes of the old can bring forth the particular behaviour in an individual consistent the stereotypes.  When we impose stereotypes on the aging, it affects their quality of life and alienates them from the rest of society - they will feel as a burden to those who love them. These misconceptions are often taken for granted and presented to the public as factual.


Here is a video clip by the parody broadcast show Onion News Network that makes light of this stereotype:

Whether the above video serves to dispel this stereotype or reinforce it is debatable. However, the situations that helpless elder stereotypes present are not necessarily false but takes a very narrow subset of elderly people and presents them as representative for the entire age group. We need to see the elderly population as a diverse group of people with various competencies, abilities, and personalities and spread across the spectrum of independency and dependency just like any other age group.

Self-fulfilling Misconceptions Surrounding Physical Health of the Elderly

In today’s society many people are victims of being stereotyped by others. Unfortunately, there are many myths concerning the elderly and they are generally stereotyped very negatively. Stereotypes are characteristics which are believed to describe members of a certain racial or social group.  Although some might think that opinions and words cannot hurt, there is substantial empirical evidence to suggest the contrary.

Stereotype threat ideology suggests that individuals subjected to negative stereotypes about a group they belong to are more susceptible to confirming the negative characterization.  It is said that when stereotypes are mentioned, it is likely that the individuals become more anxious and nervous which ultimately results in lowered performance results in lowered performance, thus reinforcing the stereotype in the mind of the observer.  A study by Joanisse, Gagnon, and Voloaca (2013), entitled “The impact of stereotype threat on the simulated driving performance of older drivers”, supports the claim that stereotype threat exists.  Sadly, negative stereotypes can be more detrimental than most of us care to realize.  One of the most common stereotypes against the elderly is the notion that they have poor physical health, this however is simply untrue.

Project Kickoff! What are some aging stereotypes?

For our project kickoff meeting, since we didn't know what we topic we wanted to focus on for our project, we each did some preliminary research literature search on different types of aging stereotypes and bring our findings to discuss. What we found was somewhat disturbing.

Many stereotypes of aging are commonly associated with some form abnormality. Below is a list of some of the adjectives we found that were negatively paired with old and aging:

Image generated courtesy of wordle.com

What is interesting is that aging is seen as counter to the "normal" condition of society; in North America, we seem to centre around a culture of youth where ideals such beauty, health, and success are synonymous the young and not the aging.

Hello! About this blog...

Greetings!

Photo by rileyroxx (CC) BY 2.0

The purpose of this blog is to document a journey of discovering the realities behind the large number of negative stereotypes associated with aging in North America and hopefully engaging readers in some discussion. This blog is part of a group project for our psychology course on Aging at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, Canada.

Our group members come from diverse backgrounds and each of us have our own unique experiences with the elderly which we also hope to share with our readers. You can find out a bit more about us by clicking on our profiles. Hopefully the documentation of our discussions and experiences will help us (and maybe others) come to face with our own preconceptions on the process of aging. We welcome you to participate by commenting on our posts.

Full disclosure: Our intent is to create a digital artifact that will provide documentation on the insights of our experiences and learning we encounter about aging stereotypes for non-commercial academic purposes solely. Although this blog will be a marked assignment for our course, we will not be using this blog for research purposes of any kind. However, please note that this is a blog on the Internet and therefore anything published, including comments, are accessible to the general public.

Hope to hear from you!

Cheers,
Kapena, Kristen, Neptune, & Wilson