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Suppose you want to examine what people think about older people. As every first year psychology student knows, the last thing you do is to go to the nearest shopping mall and ask passers by. This is for the simple reason that people are almost certain to give answers that they think are socially acceptable, rather than true. For instance, suppose that you are stopped by a sweet-faced grandmother straight from Hollywood central casting who asks you what you think of older adults. Unless you are very hard-hearted, you are unlikely to say anything but nice things, no matter what your actual opinions are. Thus, the received wisdom goes, what you need to do is to ask people anonymously. Hence, you give them questionnaires that ask for no personal details, and when people have filled them in, they send them back in anonymous packages. If you use this technique, then generally speaking, people are far more honest, and certainly are likely to be more forthright than if asked face to face by a researcher clutching a clipboard. Oh good, we might think, problem solved. Alas, this is not quite the case.
For a start, you have to be sure you are asking the right question. Early studies on attitudes to aging tended to concentrate on what people knew about aging. Aside from showing that the general public was remarkably ignorant about the subject, the only cause for concern was that a lot of medical and nursing practitioners had equally poor knowledge. If you bear in mind that such measures often ask, among other things, ‘is pain a natural part of growing old?’ [it isn’t] a positive answer does not bode well for your treatment plan.
However, what you know about aging is not necessarily the same as what you feel about aging. Knowledge and attitudes are not synonymous. For example, I’m very fond of my blu-ray player, but I have not the remotest clue how it works. A few years ago, a colleague of mine (Berenice Mahoney) and myself found that there is no correlation between people’s attitudes to old age and what they know about old age. Even after people were trained in aging awareness, although their knowledge improved, their attitudes changed not a jot (except for an increased awareness that openly complaining about older people was something that should be avoided). So you need to be sure that you are testing attitudes and not simply facts that you know about older people.
I would imagine that quite a few of you could have guessed that. However, the next finding is rather more surprising. We have known for some time that even when tested anonymously, people can still manipulate their answers in an attempt at impression management. So what a person has as a ‘gut instinct’ is not necessarily what they will admit to, even anonymously. How can we test this? One method is to measure what have become known as implicit attitudes. There are many more erudite definitions that the one I am about to give, but essentially, these are what you immediately think before you impose any sort of correction on your thoughts.
Testing implicit attitudes takes as its premise that the more closely we associate an attitude with something, the faster we respond. For example, you will recognise the word butter faster if you have just seen the word bread than if you have just seen the word Maria (unless you have a very strange mind). The implicit attitudes test (IAT) applied to aging uses this principle to see how quickly we associate pleasant words with older adults versus associating pleasant words with younger adults, and conversely, how quickly we associate unpleasant words with older and (separately) younger adults. Now if we find that older people are more readily associated with unpleasant words than younger adults are and the reverse applies to pleasant words, then we arguably have demonstrated that people have a pretty negative set of thoughts about older people.
At this point, many people will be thinking that this would not of course apply to them. The simple fact is that practically everybody has a negative implicit attitude towards older people and aging. Several studies have demonstrated this and an excellent doctoral student of mine (Paul Nash) did his entire thesis examining this point. I don’t want to give too much away because Paul is currently sending off papers for publication, but in brief, the following applies. First, implicit attitudes are not correlated with explicit attitudes to aging. No matter what people say they think about older people, even anonymously, bears no relationship to their immediate attitude to older people. Second, the negative implicit attitude is held by just about every group of people you can think of—adults of all ages and education levels are all pretty much the same. More worryingly, perhaps, so are nurses—both those specialising in aging care and those not.
Now before you panic too much at the thought that nurses hate older people, they don’t. These are just the immediate reactions before training and discipline and general sense of fair play kick in a few milliseconds later. However, the fact that underneath this level we don’t like aging all that much really isn’t all that happy a thought.
Incidentally, if you want to see Paul, there is a good chance he will be visible on your television screens over the next few weeks of Olympic competition as he is a senior judge in the athletics field events. He’s the one that looks like a thinner version of Dirk Bogarde with designer stubble. Paul can be reached for questions about IAT research at P.Nash@swansea.ac.uk.
