Bolstering and undercutting use of the elderly stereotype through communication of exemplars: The role of speaker age and exemplar stereotypicality

This study explores how older speakers' descriptions of other older persons might attenuate or bolster the use of the elderly stereotype by young list eners. Older women's descriptions were expected to have more impact on youn g participants, presumably because older persons ate considered experts abo ut elderly persons and the elderly persons seem unlikely to have a hidden a genda in describing other elderly persons. Using a a-experiment ploy, young adult women initially listened to an audiotape of an older woman or a youn ger woman describing 3 older persons in her life in either a stereotypic or counterstereotypic manner. In the alleged second experiment, participants acquired information about an older woman and formed an impression of her. Results supported our hypotheses: Participants exposed to an older woman sp eaking counterstereotypically about her peers formed less stereotypic impre ssions of a subsequently encountered older woman than participants exposed to the stereotypic descriptions. When a younger woman presented the initial descriptions, there was no difference in the subsequent impressions.