ABSTRACT
We look at the question of older adults paying higher health insurance costs than younger adults through the lens of five theories of ageism and age discrimination. These include: cognitive style, derived largely from Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice; group bias theory, including realistic conflict theory and social identity theory; terror management theory, based on Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death; the stereotype content model, based on Cuddy and Fiske’s research; and statistical discrimination, based on Phelps and Arrow’s work. We identify the key insights of each of these theories, and pay particular attention to how the conceptual gaps in one theory can be partly, but not entirely, addressed through the other theories.
