Hearken to What’s Tweeting About Seniors

A cardinal feature of the Donald Trump presidency, historians might someday declare, was policy announcements via tweet. Perhaps inspired by this American peculiarity, four statisticians in the UK choose to divine worldwide policies toward the elderly by using Twitter. They randomly selected 1,200 from a total of 185,258 English-language tweets they collected which contained the term “ageing,” “old age,” older people,” or “elderly.”
     What the researchers found after analysis was a largely negative view of seniors on social media. The elderly are portrayed as incompetent and unattractive. The findings supported prior research which added descriptions such as suspicious, intolerant, and rigid. Many of the tweets did describe old age as bringing wisdom and kindness. But reports of helping the aged seemed based more in acknowledging their fragility than in respecting their skills.
     The disempowerment expressed in all this can have life-or-death consequences, according to the researchers. When the policies of others affect seniors’ perceptions of themselves, older adults with positive views of aging live eight years longer, on average, than do those with less positive self-perceptions. Beyond this, if the major motivator for assisting seniors arises from pity for their fragility, those who begin to become empowered are at risk of losing offers of assistance.
     Let’s correct these international problems by cultivating respect for aging’s upsides. Based on their analyses, the researchers suggest one method is to embrace the term “older persons” and avoid the term “elderly,” which is currently used much more often to refer to the same age demographic.
     Let’s also work to empower older persons, which could make matters of specific terms less influential. Accomplish this by encouraging collaboration in decision making.
     When it comes to health care, though, there should be limits. A trend among health care providers is to empower consumers by describing options to them and then encouraging them to make medical decisions for themselves. But a study at Erasmus University and University of Navarra concluded that the amount of information necessary for true informed consent often disrupts adherence to expert advice. One way in which this happens is that an abundance of information overloads the consumer’s reasoning and emotions, resulting in unintentional non-adherence. Another way it happens is that the wealth of information bestows overconfidence, leading the consumer to subsequently listen less well to qualified experts and discount expert views different from their own premature conclusions.

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Embrace Sadness in Marketing to Seniors
Look At Mean, Median, Mode, and Range
Respect Your Elders
Empower Indirectly Using Co-creation
Check for Empowered Shoppers’ Compliance