Professor Julie Henry of the University of Queensland says it is in everyone's interest to be more positive about ageing. Photo: Centre for Ageing Better / Unsplash
A new study is unpacking why people become more likely to view themselves negatively as they age.
Psychologists at the University of Queensland believe older people are more likely to be exposed to ageism just as their brains become more reliant on societal cues to guide how they think and behave.
Study lead Professor Julie Henry told Afternoons she became interested in exploring the topic after seeing research which suggested the most common source of ageism older people encountered in everyday life came from themselves.
And data showed that sort of self-focused and internalised stereotyping appeared to be "more harmful for health and well-being than exposure to external sources of ageism", she said.
Henry and her colleagues subsequently undertook a review of hundreds of articles to try and better understand why challenging ageist stereotypes became harder with age.
"As we get older, on average, there is a subtle decline in memory, but we overstate it" - Professor Julie Henry
The problem was two-fold, they discovered.
It was well established that people's brains changed and processed information differently as they aged, Henry said, but one thing which stays stabled - or even increased - as they got older was our semantic memory.
That is the knowledge people accumulate across their lifetime - including everything they have learned about ageing.
"So part of the prior knowledge we're relying on is a lifetime's exposure to ageism and ageist beliefs about older people," Henry said.
In addition, as people got older, they tended to "outsource control to the environment a little bit more", she said, by relying on things like alarms to remind them of appointments.
That reliance could convince older people that, for example, their memory was not as strong as it used to be.
"As we get older, on average, there is a subtle decline in memory, but we overstate it," Henry said.
The fact older people tended to blame every memory failure they experienced on their age was a symptom of the ageism their semantic memory was feeding them, which in turn perpetuated the stereotype.
"Everyone has memory failures, we all forget things, but what happens as we get older is we blame it on our age."
She said one of the most important things people could do to counter stereotypes about ageing was being aware of them and to challenge the narratives.
"If you belong to a group that there's negative stereotypes about, you can actually perform more badly because you're scared about fulfilling the stereotype," she said - detailing the effects of a phenomenon known as stereotype threat.
However, "one of the ways it's been shown you can inoculate people to its effects, so they don't perform more badly, is telling them about it".
She said older people should try and catch negative thoughts about ageing if they could and challenge some of the beliefs they had grown up with.
"Instead of thinking, 'I'm too old to learn this technology', try and shift it on its head and [think] 'I'm never too old'."
Henry said ageism was "socially-condoned discrimination" and it needed to be challenged by people of all ages.
"We are all ageing. It is in everyone's interest to be more positive about ageing," she said.
"As a society we have to change and try to value age and ageing more."