Beat Benevolent Ageism

What some might consider as respecting one’s elders can come across to the elders as disrespectful ageism. University of Akron researchers find that gender factors into this.
     In the studies, adults in their 80’s were considered overall by young adults to be emotionally warm, yet incompetent. It’s natural to offer help. But compared to the effect when an elderly man accepted the help, when a woman accepted the help, there is less effect on the young adult’s judgment of the senior’s competence.
     Considering their findings in this and other studies, the researchers attribute the gender difference to women being perceived as less competent than men, regardless of age. The researchers go on to note the evidence that feelings of incompetence can jeopardize wellbeing in the elderly. It’s possible that women are bothered less because of a lifetime of tolerating unnecessary benevolence. Still, all seniors would benefit if paternalism is eliminated.
     Wanting to assist others is virtuous. Accommodating deficits which come with aging is courteous. The problem arises when we stretch that to assume the senior is inept. Ageism stifles seniors’ self-confidence and, consequently, their objective performance.
     Ageism also kills sales. Consider an experiment at Saarland University, German Institute for Japanese Studies, and Akita International University. Researchers asked seniors to read one of two descriptions of a store interaction. In the first scenario, when the elderly shopper says, “I’m looking for a cell phone,” the salesperson replies, “We have a phone with supersized buttons,” and when the shopper asks if the phone supports UMTS, the reply is, “Those modern abbreviations used by the younger generation often cause some confusion.” In the other scenario, the replies are, “What were you thinking about buying?” and, “This phone supports the UMTS standards.”
     We might expect that the first scenario would strike the study participants as showing sensitivity to the characteristics of the individual shopper, a desire to save the shopper’s time, and an effort to reassure the shopper that lack of technical knowledge is fine. But in fact, the older adults reading the first scenario were, on the whole, less receptive to purchasing the phone and shopping at that store in the future than were those reading the second scenario. An explanation can be found in that those seniors reading the first scenario were also more likely to say they felt they were being talked down to as if they were a child.

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Push Down Talking Down to Seniors