ABSTRACT
This study explores how older speakers' descriptions of other older persons might attenuate or bolster the use of the elderly stereotype by young listeners. Older women's descriptions were expected to have more impact on young participants, presumably because older persons are considered experts about elderly persons and the elderly persons seem unlikely to have a hidden agenda in describing other elderly persons. Using a 2-experiment ploy, young adult women initially listened to an audiotape of an older woman or a younger 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 speaking counterstereotypically about her peers formed less stereotypic impressions 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.
