Friday, March 19, 2010

Embracing Your Inner Geezer

As I pointed out in an earlier blog (The Power of Negative Thinking), a central finding from research in my field of Social Psychology is that stereotypes can have powerful influences on our behavior and judgments, and these effects can occur even when we are not aware of the process.

A particularly interesting phenomenon (to me, anyway, as I get older) has to do with aging stereotypes -- widespread beliefs and expectations about the characteristics and abilities of older people -- us geezers, in other words. In our society the stereotypical beliefs are mostly negative and have to do with loss of physical and cognitive abilities. One thing that makes aging stereotypes different from other forms of stereotyping, such as those directed at minority groups, is that all of us eventually become a member of the target group.

Note the implication of this. When we're young, we hold negative beliefs about all those "old farts" in society. At some point we finally become an old fart ourselves, and we have to deal somehow with the fact that those negative beliefs pertain to US.

Psychologist Beca Levy has proposed recently that many people may come to embody the aging stereotypes, with important personal consequences. In her words, "...stereotypes are embodied when their assimilation from the surrounding culture leads to self-definitions that, in turn, influence functioning and health" (Levy, 2009). The power of the influence is illustrated by a study of 50 year-old people whose self-perceptions of aging were measured and then their health and level of functioning was assessed over the next 20 years. Those who had more positive self-perceptions of aging at 50 had fewer health problems and lived an average of 7.5 years longer than those with negative perceptions! Importantly, these differences were not due to differences in how healthy participants were at the beginning of the study.

This study illustrates that the direction and strength of embodiment varies across people, with corresponding variations in the direction and strength of the effects. Other research has demonstrated that the influence of embodiment can vary from moment to moment, depending on the salience of stereotyped qualities in a particular situation -- that is, how much a quality like memory or physical strength is relevant to the task at hand. Imagine, for example, that you're "elderly" and you're trying to do your income taxes -- a rather complex cognitive task if there ever was one. Imagine also that you've just seen a movie depicting older people as befuddled and confused. Research mimicking this situation has shown that you are more likely to have a difficult time with the task than if you had not seen that negative movie. But importantly a movie that emphasized the positive qualities of aging, like wisdom and patience, might lead to doing the task even better.

These moment-to-moment effects of embodiment can occur even when the older person isn't thinking consciously about the stereotype. This is perhaps the most insidious aspect of all stereotypes -- they may influence us even when we aren't aware of it. It's one thing to see a movie that was obviously portraying aging in a certain way and then immediately going home to do your income taxes -- it's likely that you would be aware of the movie's message as you became confused trying to figure out the IRS instructions on, say, depreciation of tangible assets. You could consciously try to counter negative aspects of the movie or embrace positive ones and doing so might influence how well you do at your task. But many stereotypic cues are more subtle and we often don't even notice them -- the brief depiction of someone in a t.v. ad, or the quick encounter with the elderly Walmart greeter. Research has shown that these subtle, unconscious cues also may influence performance.

An example of this impact of subtle stereotypic cues is in another study by Levy. Groups of older participants were shown either positive or negative words associated with aging by flashing them on a screen very quickly -- so fast that people couldn't identify the exact word, but still encoded it (in other words, they weren't aware of the word but Levy could show that they had in fact processed it). Shortly afterward the participants performed seemingly unrelated tasks that required either memory or physical balance. Those who had been unconsciously primed with negative words did less well on both the cognitive and physical tests.

The implication of all this is that we may underestimate the impact of stereotypes on our functioning as we grow older and mistakenly attribute performance decline to aging rather than correcting attributing it to beliefs about aging. But this research also illustrates that if we embrace our inner geezer and focus on the positive aspects of aging we can overcome some of the negative expectations that lead to a self-fulfilling prophesy of cognitive and physical decline.

Grey Power!!




References:

Levy, Becca R.(2009). Stereotype emodiment: A psychosocial approach to aging. Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol 18 (6), pp. 332-336.

Levy, Becca R. (2009). Leifheit-Limson, Eric. The stereotype-matching effect: Greater influence on functioning when age stereotypes correspond to outcomes. Psychology and Aging. Vol 24(1), pp. 230-233.



Friday, March 5, 2010

Bankers' Math -- Part Quatre

We've all heard about the financial industry profits being way up lately, even as banks are stingy about loaning money and as their CEO's are making big bonuses. Here's another example of why they have certainly lost my respect.

My wife and I travel quite a bit outside of the U.S. We've found that one of the most economical ways to get foreign currency is by using an ATM card in a local machine. Withdrawals and balance inquiries used to be free, in the good old days. Over the years, though, banks have found it lucrative to charge if you use an ATM not in their network. These transactions are electronic and probably cost the bank almost nothing, yet the going fee is $2.50 for a withdrawal, possibly levied by both your bank and the one that owns the ATM. In the case of a foreign transactions, most banks, including ours, tacks on an additional 1% currency conversion fee. Even with these fees, however, it is still generally cheaper than paying 3% per transaction with a credit card, which is the going rate for most card companies (most, but not all -- see below).

Well, the CEO of our bank (First Hawaiian) must be bucking for a bigger bonus, because we received a notice recently that the fee for each ATM transaction in a foreign country will now be $5 -- double the old fee!! Five dollars to have the bank give me back some of MY money?! So, if we go to an ATM say, in France and withdraw $100 in Euros, it will cost us at least $5 + $1, or 6%, and possibly as much as 7.5% if the foreign bank levies a $2.50 fee, or 11% if they raise their own ATM fee to $5. Ridiculous!

Our way around this is to obtain a free debit/ATM card offered by Vanguard, with whom we have a retirement money market account. Because we have a lot of our retirement funds invested in Vanguard, there are no transaction fees at all, though for foreign withdrawals they will still levy the %1 conversion fee. We also recently obtained a Capital One credit card, which doesn't add the 3% foreign transaction fee most other cards do, at least not yet.

So for now we've found away around banker greed. But I'm sure those CEO's are thinking of more ways to get us. After all, it's how they earn those big bonuses!