An Examination of Age-Based Stereotype Threat About Cognitive Decline

Abstract

"Stereotype threat" is often thought of as a singular construct, with moderators and mechanisms that are stable across groups and domains. However, this is not always true. To illustrate this, the current review focuses on the stereotype threat that older adults face about their cognitive abilities. Drawing upon the multithreat framework, I first provide evidence that this is a self-concept threat and not a group-reputation threat. Because this differs from the forms of stereotype threat experienced by other groups (e.g., the threat that minority students face about their intellectual abilities), the moderators of stereotype threat observed in other groups (i.e., group identification) do not always generalize to age-based stereotype threat about cognitive decline. Looking beyond the forms of stereotype threat elicited, this review also provides evidence that the mechanisms underlying stereotype-threat effects may vary across the adult life span. Because of age-related improvements in emotion-regulation abilities, stereotype threat does not seem to reduce older adults' executive-control resources. Overall, this review highlights the need to approach the concept of stereotype threat with more granularity, allowing researchers to design more effective stereotype-threat interventions. It will also shed light on why certain stereotype threat effects "fail to replicate" across domains or groups.

Keywords: age identification; cognition; older adults; regulatory focus; stereotype threat.

Figure 1

Sentence span scores (adjusted for baseline performance) as a function of stereotype threat condition and task reward structure in Experiment 1A of Barber and Mather (2013b). Stereotype threat significantly impaired working memory performance when remembering led to monetary gains, but significantly improved performance when forgetting led to monetary losses. This pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that stereotype threat induces a prevention regulatory focus for older adults. Error bars represent the standard errors of the adjusted means.