THE ACTIVATION OF SPECIFIC FACETS OF AGE STEREOTYPES DEPENDS ON INDIVIDUATING INFORMATION

We investigated the context-dependency of an activation of different age stereotypes, using a sentence priming paradigm in combination with a lexical decision task. In two studies, pictures of young vs. old people were combined with sentences describing specific situations and behavioral activities to yield a compound prime comprising category and context information. Significant category priming effects for stereotypic traits (e.g., Slow for an old stimulus person) emerged for matching contexts (e.g., in combination with "she is crossing the street") but not for irrelevant contexts (e.g., in combination with "she is watering the flowers"). In a third and fourth study, explanations of these results in terms of interference effects of irrelevant contexts or of nonmatching age categories were ruled out by showing that neither age information nor matching context information alone leads to an activation of stereotypic traits. Our findings indicate that category information interacts with individuating information (being in a specific context, engaging in a certain behavioral activity) in activating specific aspects of age stereotypes. Some part of the mental representation of age stereotypes might thus consist in specific schemas that are triggered by a combination of category and individuating information.