Paper Agent CC BY 3.0

What do older people think that others think of them, and does it matter? The role of meta-perceptions and social norms in the prediction of perceived age discrimination.

Christin-Melanie Vauclair; Maria Luísa Lima; Dominic Abrams; Hannah J. Swift; Christopher Bratt

Publication record checked · 2026-09-30

No retraction, withdrawal, or expression-of-concern flag was found in Europe PMC at this check. This is a source-status check, not an assessment of research quality.

Live workspace

Ask the licensed paper

Ready now

Ask this paper

Ready · 269 searchable passages · Repository extract

Paper Agent

Agent platform credit

Dr. Freedom Cheteni · Editor in Chief

Research University Journal · JournalOS conception and editorial stewardship

https://orcid.org/0009-0006-3507-0094

This ORCID identifies the human contributor to the agent platform. Source-paper authors retain their own authorship and identifiers.

Attribution · TASL

Title: What do older people think that others think of them, and does it matter? The role of meta-perceptions and social norms in the prediction of perceived age discrimination.
Author: Christin-Melanie Vauclair; Maria Luísa Lima; Dominic Abrams; Hannah J. Swift; Christopher Bratt
Source: Psychology and Aging · DOI 10.1037/pag0000125 Published 2016-11-01 · Open source record
License: CC BY 3.0 deed

Text preparation and changes

JournalOS created a plain-text search index from the linked open repository record. Markup and layout are removed, whitespace is normalized, and results select and reorder otherwise unchanged passages. Open the canonical source to verify complete context.

Coverage: repository text extract. Verify context in the canonical source. Not clinical advice or emergency support.

Source context

Psychological theories of aging highlight the importance of social context. However, very little research has distinguished empirically between older people’s perception of how others in their social context perceive them (personal meta-perceptions) and the shared perceptions in society (societal meta-perceptions). Drawing on theories of intergroup relations and stereotyping and using a multilevel perspective, this article examines how well older people’s perceptions of age discrimination (PAD) are predicted by (a) older people’s personal meta-perceptions, (b) societal meta-perceptions, and (c) social norms of intolerance toward age prejudice. Aging meta-perceptions are differentiated into the cognitive and affective components of ageism. Multilevel analyses of data from the European Social Survey (Nover 70 years of age = 8,123, 29 countries; European Social Survey (ESS) Round 4 Data, 2008) confirmed that older people’s personal meta-perceptions of negative age stereotypes and specific intergroup emotions (pity, envy, contempt) are associated with higher PAD. However, at the societal-level, only paternalistic meta-perceptions were consistently associated with greater PAD. The results show that a few meta-perceptions operate only as a psychological phenomenon in explaining PAD, some carry consonant, and others carry contrasting effects at the societal-level of analysis. This evidence extends previous research on aging meta-perceptions by showing that both the content of meta-perceptions and the level of analysis at which they are assessed make distinct contributions to PAD. Moreover, social norms of intolerance of age prejudice have a larger statistical effect than societal meta-perceptions. Social interventions would benefit from considering these differential findings.

How this agent works

It searches a plain-text extract of the linked open repository record. It returns matching source passages and refuses to invent an answer when the indexed record is silent.

Original journal: Psychology and Aging
Published: 2016-11-01
DOI: 10.1037/pag0000125
Open record: PMC5104248

Read full article Open PDF Canonical source License deed

The original authors and American Psychological Association do not endorse this journal or its agent. Verify findings in the canonical article before making consequential decisions.