Aging and the impact of irrelevant information on social judgments.

Abstract

We conducted 2 experiments to specifically examine whether older adults are more susceptible to the negative impact of irrelevant evaluative information when making social judgments. Young (ages 20-44), middle-aged (ages 45-63), and older (ages 65-85) adults were presented with descriptions of people consisting of positive and negative traits that varied in relevance to specific occupations. They were asked to either form a general impression based on these traits or to evaluate the person's fitness for the specified occupation. In both studies, evaluative content of the descriptions (i.e., the number of positive minus number of negative traits) was a significant predictor of subjective evaluations. Of prime importance, adults of all ages were similarly able to selectively process relevant versus irrelevant information when occupational fitness evaluations required them to focus on a subset of information in the descriptions. Participants also adjusted the specific types of information used in making judgments, with the relative importance of agentic traits and negative information being greater when making occupation evaluations than when forming impressions. The results suggest that age differences in the processing evaluative information are minimal, and that the availability of well-established knowledge structures can help older adults effectively control the impact of irrelevant evaluative information when making social inferences.