La edad se correlaciona directamente con la fuerza de los estereotipos de género: Evidencia obtenida en una tarea de memoria de reconocimiento

Several theories predict a direct correlation between age and stereotypes. However, studies that show this effect typically compare older adults (> 55-60 years of age) with young adults. Contrastingly, in the current study participants were 79 high-SES individuals between 18 and 60 years of age, students and professors of a private university in Santiago de Chile, who responded to a mass email. The work reported here focuses on gender stereotypes and asks whether middle aged adults (≈ 40 years of age) also show a higher level of stereotypes than adolescents and young adults. A recognition memory task was used, in which participants read lists of sentences describing men and women carrying out stereotyped and neutral daily activities, and then had to recognize them intermixed with distractor sentences. Data were analyzed by mixed ANOVAs and showed that the sample as a whole exhibited a memory benefit for gender stereotyped over neutral stimuli, and that, as predicted, middle aged adults showed almost twice the memory benefit than young adults and adolescents.