The expected doubling in the number of American citizens aged 65 and older in the coming decades highlights the importance of understanding age bias. Older adults encounter discrimination in employment contexts, particularly when seeking employment, but age bias has received relatively little empirical attention. The current proposal investigates a novel intervention targeting age bias and age discrimination in hiring. I propose a simple intervention to reduce age bias, which derives from research on how change in the self is mistaken for change in the world. That is, because individuals falsely assume that their personal self is stable and unchanging, they overestimate how much society and """"""""kids these days"""""""" have changed from the past. In a series of correlational and experimental studies, this research found that prompting individuals to recall how much they has personally changed in the past improved their ability to accurately attribute where changes had occurred - in themselves or in society. I hypothesize that the unchallenged assumption that the self is stable and unchanging over time influences age biases and stereotyping. In this three-study dissertation project, I propose a brief intervention in which participants are asked to either retrospectively recollect ways that they have changed in the past or prospectively predict ways that they will change in the future. Using a large and demographically-diverse sample, I will test whether this intervention reduces negative stereotyping of older adults and also reduces age discrimination in hiring. Current research on age bias and discrimination has had trouble identifying interventions that reduce age bias, understanding the contexts and evaluations in which age bias is most prevalent, and identifying interventions that allow older adults to maintain positive self-image in the face of age discrimination. [Thus, the proposed research will add to the understanding of the causes of age bias and how age bias affects discrimination, by developing a simple, cost-effective intervention that reduces age discrimination. After its effectiveness is established, the findings will be translated into a 5-minute Web-accessible module for use by the public and key decision-makers, who could use it before making age-relevant decisions that are legally required to be discrimination-free. This research is relevant to public health both because encountering age discrimination appears to directly affect individuals'stress-related responses (Bugental &Hehman, 2007) and because age bias affects perceptions of older workers (Gordon &Arvey, 2004;Lahey, 2006).]
| Lindner, Nicole M; Graser, Alexander; Nosek, Brian A (2014) Age-based hiring discrimination as a function of equity norms and self-perceived objectivity. PLoS One 9:e84752 |
