Perceptions of the Elderly: Stereotypes as Prototypes

Three studies are reported exploring the structure of young persons' perceptions of the elderly within the framework of Eleanor Rosch's theory of natural categories. The first two studies employed picture-sorting, trait-rating, and statementsorting tasks to demonstrate that the cognitive representation of the elderly as a social category is differentiated into meaningful subcategories associated with distinctive physical features and personality and behavioral characteristics. In addition, it was found that behavioral and personality associations were stronger for "prototypic" instances of the different subcategories than for less prototypic instances. The third study investigated the effects of category prototypicality on the processing and recall of information about specific individuals. It was found that information that mixes features from different subcategories (within the general category of the elderly) is recalled less well than is homogeneous information. On the other hand, information describing an elderly individual that is /^consistent with generalized stereotypes of the aged takes longer to process and is recalled as well as is prototype-consistent information. These results were all interpreted to support the general conclusion that stereotyping of individuals occurs at the level of basic rather than superordinate categories.

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