Interacting with older adults can trigger a number of stereotypes. Negative stereotypes tend to dominate, but a persistent positive perception of aging in the popular psyche is that age brings wisdom. Despite this common belief, previous research suggests that the relationship between age and wisdom is weak and inconsistent. We propose that this is due to opposing perceptions of aging - gains in life experience and socioemotional skills, counteracted by declines in cognitive skill - that also vary with characteristics of the perceiver and the context. We investigated these paradoxical perceptions of aging by asking younger (aged 20-40) and older (aged 60-80) adult judges to rate adult speakers (aged 30-89) on the basis of their responses to three narrative prompts. Several aspects of wisdom were judged, including those related to cognitive skills, and those related to socioemotional aspects of wisdom. We examined the impact on ratings of speaker and rater characteristics, as well as the interaction of these characteristics with the dimension being rated. Findings showed that the wisdom ratings were higher for speakers with better verbal fluency, and that the relationship between age and perceived wisdom was moderated by the speaker's gender. Consistent with prior work, speaker age (relative to rater's age) had a negative effect on cognitive aspects of wisdom, but a positive effect on socio-affective aspects of wisdom. Implications for understanding age-related stereotypes and conceptions of wisdom are discussed.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 23 November 2016.
All research outputs
#17,882,226
of 27,836,906 outputs
Outputs from Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition
#314
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Outputs of similar age
#179,275
of 318,039 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition
#5
of 10 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 27,836,906 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 33rd percentile – i.e., 33% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 425 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 10.8. This one is in the 24th percentile – i.e., 24% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
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