Categorization of the Elderly by the Elderly

Abstract

Selected aspects of the Brewer, Dull, and Lui (1981) study of stereotypes of the aged were replicated with elderly individuals as subjects. In terms of degree of differentiation among category members and degree of stereotyping of representative members of specific age-related subcategories, there was some support for the hypothesis that elderly subjects have a more complex representation of the category of old people than do younger subjects. However, there is some indication that this complexity effect is limited to the subcategory of elderly persons that is perceived as most similar to the self and does not extend to the superordinate category as a whole.