Aging is Beautiful- and It’s Time We Embrace It

As medicine expands and human knowledge grows, the population changes- with longer average lifespans and lower birth rates. In short, more old people. Over the years, the rising elderly population has faced increasingly high prejudice which sees them as hindering social productivity and dynamism.

In 1975, Butler first coined the term ‘ageism’ to mean “[prejudices which are] a process of systematic stereotyping and discrimination against people simply because they are old.” Since then, much research has been done on this apparently very widespread stereotype- so widespread that it can be found in every age range and every country. 

This recent study set out to find out how psychology might influence these stereotypes against the elderly, in an experiment of 886 middle-aged individuals (65% female). The study evaluated the existing stereotypes of each participant, how anxious they were about aging, and their general knowledge about the aging process (did they believe in common myths like “physical age always declines with age”). As initially hypothesized, anxiety is negatively predicted by knowledge and age. So, people who know more about the aging process and those who are older to begin with are generally less anxious about aging. Makes sense. Let’s look at some further results. Stereotypes are predicted negatively by knowledge and positively by age and anxiety. This is interesting. People who have more knowledge about aging, younger people, and people who are less anxious about aging all have fewer ageist stereotypes. 

Great, now we know what this study is trying to say. So, what does it mean? Well, the results tell us that younger people are generally more anxious about aging, and that includes worries about physical appearance, financial stability, and emotional variance. These worries are usually personal and maybe are related to an inner desire to satisfy social ideals of youth, which is very typical of western societies that generally promote an anti-aging culture. But there’s a super interesting caveat to this result. Younger people may be more anxious about aging, and generally know less about aging itself, but older people are the ones that tend to have more stereotypes about their own age group. This surprising (or maybe not so surprising but at least interesting) finding is the same in this more dated study. This tells us perhaps the biggest problem with ageism is in personal perceptions, that is, ageism is a social stereotype that decreases self-esteem and increases depressing thoughts in the very people it discriminates against. 

But wait! There’s more. One of the results stated increased knowledge correlated negatively with stereotypes. That’s heartening because that means educating people (old and young) about aging in general and dissolving some of those anxieties about aging will lower stereotypes in the general population. At least in theory and based on research. That means this article (and all the research it cites) is pretty important, since it serves as a call to action for civilized societies around the world that are realizing ageism is a real psychosocial problem. Preventative programs that aim to educate the public and reduce fears about aging are needed, and as these researchers say, it is easier to learn than to re-learn, so these preventative programs are best instated and carried out during childhood or early development. In the best of scenarios, self-esteem and self-efficacy for older people will get better with time, which could lead to the older population believing in themselves more, doing more to change and improve the world, and overall lead to a happier (and healthier) planet Earth.

— Allie Yuxin Lin