Abstract
Studies have shown that priming with negative age stereotypes can degrade the performance of older adults on typical laboratory tasks. Here we evaluate whether priming with positive age stereotypes can improve performance on an ecologically valid task, modelled after the subjects’ duties at work. Twenty healthy employees (age: O 52.75 years; SD = 9.45) from the receiving department of a wholesale company were primed with the scrambled sentence task. The experimental group (n = 10) was primed with positive age stereotypes such as “wise”. In the control group (n = 10) no age stereotypes were presented. Both groups were subsequently tested with a delivery-verification task, in which the contents of a parcel had to be checked against an invoice. The experimental group completed the verification task within 4.31 minutes (SD = 2.22), and the control group within 7.18 minutes (SD = 2.12). The difference was statistically significant (t(18) = 2.8; p < 0.05). Positive supraliminal priming appears to be a promising technique to enhance the job-related performance of elderly employees.
Highlights
As our workforce grows older due to demographic change, it becomes increasingly important to maintain the working efficiency of older employees
Since people behave in ways that are consistent with prevailing societal stereotypes (Wheeler & Petty, 2001), it stands to reason that elderly persons act in accordance with the largely negative preconceptions about old age (Kite, Stockdale, Whitley, & Johnson, 2005) and perform less well than they would otherwise
The present study documents for the first time that priming with positive age stereotypes is beneficial for the performance of elderly workers on a task modeled after real duties at work
Summary
As our workforce grows older due to demographic change, it becomes increasingly important to maintain the working efficiency of older employees. Policies and procedures should target the age-related decay of biological and psychological functions, and the impact of societal attitudes towards the elderly. In this approach, memory contents are activated by semantic or figurative cues that either are presented at full awareness (explicit priming), are disguised by integration into another task (supraliminal priming), or are flashed so briefly that conscious processing is excluded (subliminal priming); it is yet unknown which of these methods is most effective (Horton, Baker, Pearce, & Deakin, 2008)
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