- Email: [email protected]
Consumer decision making and aging: A commentary
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Journal of Consumer Psychology 19 (2009) 23 – 27
Research Dialogue
Consumer decision making and aging: A commentary Brian Sternthal ⁎, Andrea Bonezzi Department of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 60208, USA Available online 29 January 2009
Abstract Yoon, Cole and Lee's review suggests two strategies to address elderly individuals' limitations in processing information and decision making. One is accommodation, which entails designing information processing and judgment tasks so that they are compatible with the elderly's resource limitations. The other strategy involves stimulating self-regulation. Here the premise is that elderly individuals often have the resources necessary to engage in a task, but only activate them in response to explicit directions. We discuss whether this observation reflects older individuals' inability to activate self-regulation strategies spontaneously, or their purposive rationing of their limited resources so they remain available for more profound activities. © 2008 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Yoon, Cole, and Lee's review suggests several approaches to address elderly adults' cognitive deficits and improve their performance. The one that strategists appear to use most often entails matching the task demands to elderly individuals' reduced resource availability by simplifying task requirements. Jitterbug, for example, is a mobile phone targeted at seniors. It features oversized backlit buttons, bright and large text, loud and clear speaker sounds, along with a 24-hour operator service to help make calls, provide directory assistance and add names to a phone list. This approach is based on the premise that elderly individuals' performance deficits are due to a resource limitation, which implies that their performance can be enhanced by limiting task demands to match their resource availability. We refer to these strategies as accommodation. The weight of evidence leaves little doubt that aging is associated with a decline in cognitive resources, and that older adults experience a resource limitation in relation to their younger counterparts. However, Yoon, Cole, and Lee's review also suggests that a cognitive limitation is not the only factor responsible for elderly people's performance deficits. Indeed, they document that older individuals' poor task performance can reflect a failure to deploy the resources that they do have. This is demonstrated by the fact that older individuals' performance is enhanced by presenting prompts to motivate the activation of the resources needed for task performance. ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (B. Sternthal).
For example, while older consumers may encounter greater difficulty than younger people in mastering the use of devices such as an iPhone, given an appropriate processing strategy and the motivation to employ it, they are likely to exhibit proficiency in its use. A good candidate for such strategies would be the consumer who was described as “older than God and blind as a bat,” who when asked what he thought about the Jitterbug replied that what he really wanted was an iPhone. The premise underlying this approach is that older people have the resources necessary to exhibit good task performance but often fail to apply them. The prescription for enhancing elderly people's task performance in this situation is to stimulate the activation and effective application of the resources they do have. We refer to these strategies as stimulation of self-regulation. The purpose of this comment is to offer an analysis of the elderly's decision making that elaborates on issues raised by Yoon, Cole, and Lee. Their review identifies strategies that consumers, marketers and policy makers can implement to improve the fit between the resources required by a task and those available to the elderly. As a starting point in developing our analysis, we recast the strategies they propose to achieve fit into the two categories we have described: accommodation and stimulation of self-regulation. We start by briefly summarizing the strategies discussed by Yoon, Cole, and Lee that can be subsumed under the accommodation approach. Then we present a more detailed assessment of strategies to stimulate selfregulation. We document that some of the elderly's performance
1057-7408/$ - see front matter © 2008 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2008.12.004
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B. Sternthal, A. Bonezzi / Journal of Consumer Psychology 19 (2009) 23–27
deficits described by Yoon, Cole, and Lee are also found in younger populations, and we employ insights derived from the theoretical accounts developed to explain these deficits to suggest strategies that might enhance elderly individuals' learning and task performance. The evidence marshaled by Yoon, Cole, and Lee in support of the assertion that stimulating self-regulation enhances older adults' performance raises a fundamental question: does elderly individuals' failure to allocate the resources necessary to perform certain tasks reflect an inability to activate effective self-regulation strategies spontaneously, or a purposive rationing of their limited resources? We address this question following our discussion of accommodation and stimulation of self-regulation by introducing theorizing on construal level and examining its implications for elderly individual's learning and performance. Accommodation Accommodation is a means of increasing fit that can be achieved using a variety of strategies described by Yoon, Cole, and Lee. One type of accommodation strategy involves adjusting the task demands to match the resources elderly individuals have available. Along these lines, simplified product versions and additional services, such as those developed by Jitterbug, might be offered in order to adapt to reductions in older individuals' working memory. Alternatively, accommodation can be achieved by matching task demands with the elderly individuals' level of resource availability at different times of day: more cognitively demanding tasks might be presented in the morning, whereas less effortful tasks can be reserved for later in the day (May, Hasher, & Stoltzfus, 1993; Yoon, 1997). In some situations, elderly individuals' deficits in learning are attributable to an age-related reduction in the speed with which they process information (Birren, 1974). Providing older people additional time to process information, such as by using self-paced media (print rather than broadcast), should compensate for their diminished speed of processing and enhance their learning (Phillips & Sternthal, 1977). Finally, elderly individuals' decisions appear to rely more on an affective system that is automatic, implicit, and effortless rather than on a deliberative system that is analytical, conscious, and effortful (e.g., Kahneman, 2003). Messages that take into consideration this proclivity are likely to be better processed (Peters et al., 2007). Another type of accommodation involves making use of the extensive knowledge that older individuals have accumulated over time. This might entail taking advantage of factual information possessed by elderly individuals. As Yoon, Cole, and Lee report, older adults were as good as younger individuals in recalling information about grocery prices when actual prices were to be remembered, but not when prices were fabricated and bore little resemblance to the ones experienced in reality (Castel, 2005). Alternatively, accommodation might be achieved by representing information in a manner that is congruent with elderly individuals' schema, that is, in a way that fits people's elaborated cognitive structures. Although cognitive
resources generally decline with age, knowledge not only increases over time, but also becomes more structured and organized in the form of schemas and scripts. Along these lines, Morrow et al. (1996) found that when medication instructions are presented in a way that is compatible with the schema for taking medication that most people possess, compliance with the prescribed regimen is enhanced. In sum, the evidence marshaled by Yoon, Cole, and Lee offers strong support for the notion that older adults experience a resource limitation in relation to their younger counterparts. Accommodating these limitations either by simplifying the task demands or relying on the extensive knowledge that older people do have is judicious. At the same time, the evidence pertaining to accommodation is not conclusive about whether in the absence of accommodation the deficits in task performance exhibited by elderly individuals are the result of a failure to allocate the resources they do have or a resource limitation. Investigations related to stimulation of self-regulation address this issue. Stimulation of self-regulation What accounts for older adults learning and performance deficits? The fact that elderly individuals perform implicit memory tasks as well as their younger counterparts (Fleishmann et al., 2004) suggests that their limitations are unlikely to reflect an inability to encode information. When this observation is combined with the fact that the elderly perform well in recalling information with which they are familiar, the implication is that older people's difficulty in learning and their poor task performance often reflect a failure to engage in the processing strategy that makes relevant information accessible. We refer to this strategy as elaboration. Elaboration involves linking an object to a rich associative network that is already in memory, or connecting bits of information that are encoded from external sources. Elaboration is resource demanding. Nevertheless, the failure of elderly individuals to elaborate on information is unlikely to be due to their diminished cognitive resources because they exhibit an ability to engage in elaboration when given explicit instructions about how to do so. Instructions to form a mental image of a claim (Law, Hawkins, & Craik, 1998) or to justify a decision (Kim et al., 2005) were found to be successful in enhancing older people's learning, whereas simply asking older adults to think deeply did not prompt detailed processing and effective stimulus learning (Cole & Houston, 1987). Support for the contention that a failure to elaborate spontaneously on message information is implicated in elderly individuals' learning and performance deficits is offered by investigations examining older people's processing of communications with an assertion-plus-tag structure. One situation in which this structure is encountered occurs in processing negations (Skurnik et al., 2005). A negation is an affirmation preceded by a negator (e.g., It's not delivery, its DiGiorno; It's not your father's Oldsmobile). Elderly individuals' recall of a negation message is accurate when recall is immediate, but with the passage of time they appear to remember only the
B. Sternthal, A. Bonezzi / Journal of Consumer Psychology 19 (2009) 23–27
affirmation and thus make the wrong inference (e.g., DiGiorno is delivery; It's my father's Oldsmobile). This phenomenon has been observed in segments other than the elderly (Gilbert, 1991). One explanation for it is in terms of perceptual fluency (Schwarz, 2004; Skurnik et al., 2005). According to this view, older individuals do not remember whether an assertion was negated or not after a delay because of a decline in explicit memory. But because their implicit memory is strong, they experience the message as being familiar, which leads them to accept the affirmation. Elaboration offers an alternative explanation. Here, the contention is that despite the availability of the negator in memory (as indicated by a directed search of memory using a recall probe), it is not as highly elaborated as the affirmation and thus is less accessible at the time of judgment (Grant, Malaviya, & Sternthal, 2004). This disparity in elaboration is not manifested when recall occurs in close proximity to the presentation of information because the potential reduction in the accessibility of the negator that results from its lack of elaboration is offset by its recency of presentation. However, when the effect of recency is limited by a longer delay between information presentation and recall, the lack of elaboration makes the negator inaccessible. Elderly individuals also exhibit difficulties in processing communications with an assertion-plus-tag structure, where the tag is a spokesperson for a message. In the study reported by Rahhal, May, and Hasher (2002), participants inferred the truth of an affirmation from the knowledge of who presented it: one person presented true assertions and the other person made false ones. For younger people, both the message source and its association with the message were accessible in memory. In contrast, older individuals appeared to use information about the message source to make an on-the-spot inference about the truth of the assertion and then to remember only whether the affirmation was true or not. As a result, elderly individuals were able to recall accurately whether an affirmation was true or false, but they could not accurately identify the source of a true and false affirmation. The difficulties exhibited by elderly people in accessing information about the tag when it is represented by a message source have been investigated in other populations where the phenomenon is referred to as a sleeper effect (Cook & Flay, 1978; Kumkale & Albarracín, 2004). A sleeper effect describes the observation that a message presented by a low credibility source is less persuasive immediately after its presentation than after a delay. These findings are explained by noting that the source is accessible immediately after the message presentation even in the absence of its elaboration by virtue of its recency. Here, the source's lack of credibility undermines the positive impact of an otherwise persuasive message. However, after a delay the assertion but not the source is accessible as a basis for judgment because the assertion was elaborated more extensively. As a result, the impact of the appeal increases. Evidence regarding the processing of an assertion-plus-tag thus suggests that individuals can offset difficulties associated with representing the tag by elaborating on it and integrating its
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content with the assertion during message encoding. One way this might be achieved efficiently is by elaborating on the assertion in a manner that also represents the information contained in the tag. When the tag is a low credibility source, the information contained in the assertion could be encoded as false, thus eliminating the need to remember the message source when a judgment is later rendered. In a similar fashion, when the tag is a negator, individuals can integrate that information into their assessment of the assertion, perhaps by converting the negation into an affirmation. Along these lines, “It's not delivery; it's DiGiorno” might be encoded as “DiGiorno is as good as delivery.” The notion that elderly individuals, learning and performance deficits are sometimes the result of a failure to engage in elaboration spontaneously suggests that external prompts to elaborate on stimulus information should enhance their performance. As we discussed earlier, detailed instructions on how to engage in elaboration are helpful in guiding older people not only to recruit available resources, but also to use them effectively. Along the same lines, experts exhibit an ability to offset deficits associated with aging by taking notes (Morrow et al., 2003). Apparently, this activity provides a means of elaboration that enhances the representation of associations in memory as well as freeing working memory to process other information. Pictorial stimuli have also been shown to improve the memory of older adults, resulting in the same level of recognition as that observed in younger adults, even after intervals of a month (Park et al., 1988). Viewed from an elaboration perspective, pictorial information enhances learning by facilitating the development of a rich associative network (Kisielius & Sternthal, 1986). One additional approach to stimulating elaboration among elderly individuals warrants mention. Evidence suggests that a positive disposition toward being elderly enhances their memory performance. As Yoon, Cole, and Lee note, presenting positive stereotypes of the elderly stimulated better learning among older adults than did negative stereotypes (Hess, 2005). Similarly, it seems plausible that superior memory performance exhibited by Chinese elderly in relation to their American counterparts is attributable to the greater positive regard typically accorded to older Chinese adults (Levy & Langer, 1994). The prevailing explanation for these findings is that contexts such as memory tests activate stereotypes (e.g., memory declines with age) that either increase elderly individuals' anxiety or decrease the effort they devote to the task (Steele, 1997). In either event, the result is poor memory performance (see Hess, 2005 for a review). However, it is also plausible that the presence of positive affect enhances performance by stimulating elaboration. Pleasant feelings have been shown to facilitate the association of seemingly unrelated objects (Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987; Roehm & Sternthal, 2001). These associations provide an elaborative network that facilitates the accessibility of stimulus information. Moreover, positive affect has been found to prompt a focus on performing work that is important to do rather than pleasant to do, and thus might induce the elderly to attend
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critical elements of a task rather than ones they enjoy (Isen & Reeve, 2005). These observations suggest that the elderly often have the resources necessary to represent the information on which judgments are to be made in memory. Their poorer learning and performance in relation to younger adults is thus a matter of not activating the strategies that prompt an elaboration of the information on which an informed judgment can be made. This conclusion raises the question of why elderly people do not use the resources they have available to invoke elaboration. Self-regulation failure or purposive rationing of limited resources? An important insight emerging from Yoon, Cole, and Lee's review is that age-related performance deficits are often attributable not to a limitation in resources, but to a failure to self-regulate. Whether this failure is attributable to older adults' inability to activate and apply the resources they do have, a deliberate rationing of their resources, or both of these factors, is not resolved by the available evidence. However, emerging theorizing related to construal level theory (CLT) offers some insight about how the investigation of this question might proceed. CLT is based on the notion that individuals represent events at different levels, ranging from abstract high-level construals that capture the de-contextualized, global, superordinate, primary features of an event to low-level construals that capture contextualized, local, subordinate, secondary features (Trope & Liberman, 2003; for a review see Trope, Liberman, & Wakslak, 2007). For example, the act of voting might be construed as supporting democracy (high-level construal) or checking a box on a form in a voting booth (low-level construal; Vallacher & Wegner, 1989). Furthermore, when people construe events at a high level of abstraction, they tend to focus on the achievement of long-term self-regulatory goals, whereas when they adopt a low-level construal they tend to focus on the achievement of short-term self-regulatory goals (Fujita et al., 2006). The relevance of construal level in explaining the effects of aging on task performance has emerged recently in a study documenting a relationship between people's chronic construal level and their age. The finding suggests that older people have a tendency to represent information at a higher level of construal than younger individuals (Hong, 2008). For example, Hong reports that older people interpret a word meaning “whipping school children” (dippoldism) as misconduct, whereas younger people take it to mean something more concrete — a spanking (McGinnis & Zelinski, 2000). The implication of this observation is that older people are likely to adopt high-level construals that stimulate a focus on abstract self-regulatory goals. Moreover, such a focus is thought to foster self-regulation (Fujita et al., 2006). Why then do older people exhibit what appears to be a failure to evoke spontaneously those strategies that would facilitate learning and task performance? These outcomes may reflect the fact that while older individuals are focused on abstract goals, they only pursue them if they feel they are worthwhile attaining.
When they are not worthwhile, they engage in resource conservation. This line of reasoning suggests two alternative strategies to enhance the performance of elderly consumers. One is to take advantage of elderly individuals' proclivity toward focusing on higher-order goals as a basis for self-regulation by ensuring that these goals are relevant. For example, as we discussed earlier, older adults exhibited poorer performance than their younger counterparts when the task was to learn unrealistic prices, but no age differences were found when prices were realistic (Castel, 2005). An alternative strategy is to prompt a consideration of low-level construals by directing older individuals' to follow step-by-step decision-making procedures. As noted earlier, there is evidence that providing instructions to elaborate on message information by forming a mental image (Law et al., 1998) or by developing a justification for their decision (Kim et al., 2005) enhances elderly adults' learning. Conclusion The evidence reviewed by Yoon, Cole, and Lee suggests it is premature to conclude that the deficits exhibited by elderly individuals are necessarily either a matter of resource limitations, or an inability to allocate the resources they do have. To understand whether such deficits are purposive it seems worthwhile to assess whether construal level mediates the effects of age on task performance. If construal level accounts for elderly individuals' preferred means of self-regulation, their level of construal can be varied based on an assessment of which level is more likely to enhance the elderly's consideration of relevant information on which to base a decision (Fujita et al., 2006). On the one hand, when elderly individuals perceive a task to be at odds with their high-level goals, task performance could be enhanced by inducing a low-level construal, using devices such as having people focus on how an activity is performed, or prompting them to adopt a proximate time perspective. On the other hand, when the higher order goals achieved by a task fit with older people's orientation, the highlevel construal that they spontaneously adopt might be the preferred means of stimulating good performance. In this case, older adults' high-level construal could be reinforced by prompting a focus on why an activity is performed, or by stimulating a distal temporal orientation (Trope et al., 2007). Our analysis of the evidence presented by Yoon, Cole, and Lee suggests that fit between elderly adults' abilities and task demands might be achieved by introducing devices that promote the activation of the appropriate level of self-construal or for that matter other means of self-regulation. Support for this line of reasoning would suggest that at least some of the elderly's limitations are a matter of self-regulatory choice rather than a result of limitations in the ability to self-regulate that are known to accompany aging. The proposed account raises the question of why elderly people exhibit a tendency to adopt high-level construals. There are several plausible rationales for this proclivity. It may be that high-level construals are adopted because they accommodate older adults' resources limitations by offering a less effortful
B. Sternthal, A. Bonezzi / Journal of Consumer Psychology 19 (2009) 23–27
means of rendering judgments than is required by low-level construals. Alternatively, it may be that as people age they are more focused on the life goals they have achieved, or wish to achieve, than on the details of day-to-day activities. Finally, and perhaps the most likely possibility, is that elderly individuals adopt a high-level construal for some situations and a low-level construal for others, and to this point investigations have examined situations in which only the former construal emerges. The value of these accounts in illuminating the decision-making motivations of older adults awaits further investigation. References Birren, J. E. (1974). Translations in gerontology — from lab to life: Psychophysiology and speed of response. American Psychologist, 29, 808−815. Castel, A. D. (2005). Memory for grocery prices in younger and older adults: The role of schematic support. Psychology and Aging, 20, 718−721. Cole, C. A., & Houston, M. J. (1987). Encoding and media effects on consumer learning deficiencies in the elderly. Journal of Marketing Research, 24, 55−63. Cook, T. D., & Flay, B. R. (1978). The persistence of experimentally induced attitude change. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 11. (pp. 2−57)New York: Academic Press. Fleischmann, D. A., Wilson, R. S., Garbrieli, J. D. E., Bienias, J. L., & Bennett, D. A. (2004). A longitudinal study of implicit and explicit memory in old persons. Psychology and Aging, 19, 617−625. Fujita, K., Trope, Y., Liberman, N., & Levin-Sagi, M. (2006). Construal levels and self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 251−367. Gilbert, D. T. (1991). How mental systems believe. American Psychologist, 46, 107−119. Grant, S. J., Malaviya, P., & Sternthal, B. (2004). The influence of negation on product evaluations. Journal of Consumer Research, 31, 583−591. Hess, T. M. (2005). Memory and aging in context. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 383−406. Hong, J. (2008). The consequences of mixed emotions on consumer judgment and choice. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University. Isen, A. M., Daubman, K. A., & Nowicki, G. P. (1987). Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 1122−1131. Isen, A. M., & Reeve, J. (2005). The influence of positive affect on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: Facilitating enjoyment of play, responsible work behavior, and self-control. Motivation and Emotion, 29, 295−323. Kahneman, D. (2003). Maps of bounded rationality: Psychology for behavioral economics. American Economic Review, 93, 1449−1475. Kim, S., Goldstein, D., Hasher, L., & Zacks, R. T. (2005). Framing effects in younger and older adults. Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 60B, 215−218. Kisielius, J., & Sternthal, B. (1986). Examining the vividness controversy: An availability-valence interpretation. Journal of Consumer Research, 12, 418−431.
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Kumkale, G. T., & Albarracín, D. (2004). The sleeper effect in persuasion: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 143−172. Law, S., Hawkins, S. A., & Craik, F. I. M. (1998). Repetition-induced belief in the elderly: Rehabilitating age-related memory deficits. Journal of Consumer Research, 25, 91−107. Levy, B., & Langer, E. (1994). Aging free from stereotypes: Successful memory in China and among the American deaf. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66(6), 989−997. May, C. P., Hasher, L., & Stoltzfus, E. (1993). Optimal time of day and the magnitude of age differences in memory. Psychological Science, 4, 326−330. McGinnis, D., & Zelinski, E. M. (2000). Understanding unfamiliar words: The influence of processing resources, vocabulary knowledge, and age. Psychology and Aging, 15, 335−350. Morrow, D. G., Leirer, V. O., Andrassy, J. M., Tanke, E. D., & Stine-Morrow, E. (1996). Medication instruction design: Younger and older adult schemas for taking medication. Human Factors, 38, 556−573. Morrow, D. G., Ridolfo, H., Menard, W., Sanborn, A., Stine-Morrow, E., Magnor, C., Herman, L., Teller, T., & Bryan, D. (2003). Environmental support promotes expertise-based mitigation of age differences on pilot communication tasks. Psychology and Aging, 18, 268−284. Park, D. C., Royal, D., Dudley, W., & Morrell, R. (1988). Forgetting of pictures over a long retention interval in young and older adults. Psychology and Aging, 3, 9495. Peters, E., Hess, T. M., Västfjäll, D., & Auman, C. (2007). Adult age differences in dual information processes: Implications for the role of affective and deliberative processes in older adults' decision making. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2, 1−23. Phillips, L. W., & Sternthal, B. (1977). Age differences in information processing: A perspective on the aged consumer. Journal of Marketing Research, 19, 444−457. Rahhal, T. A., May, C. P., & Hasher, L. (2002). Truth and character: Sources that older adults can remember. Psychological Science, 13, 101−105. Roehm, M., & Sternthal, B. (2001). The moderating effect of knowledge and resources on the persuasive impact of analogies. Journal of Consumer Research, 28, 257−272. Schwarz, N. (2004). Metacognitive experiences in consumer judgment and decision making. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14, 332−348. Skurnik, I., Yoon, C., Park, D. C., & Schwarz, N. (2005). How warnings become recommendations: Paradoxical effects of warnings on beliefs of older consumers. Journal of Consumer Research, 31, 713−724. Steele, C. (1997). A threat in the air. How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American Psychologist, 52, 613−629. Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2003). Temporal construal. Psychological Review, 110, 403−421. Trope, Y., Liberman, N., & Wakslak, C. (2007). Construal levels and psychological distance: Effects on representation, prediction, evaluation, and behavior. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 17, 83−95. Vallacher, R. R., & Wegner, D. M. (1989). Levels of personal agency: Individual variation in action identification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 660−671. Yoon, C. (1997). Age differences in consumers' processing strategies: An investigation of moderating influences. Journal of Consumer Research, 24, 329−342.
Journal of Consumer Psychology 19 (2009) 23 – 27
Research Dialogue
Consumer decision making and aging: A commentary Brian Sternthal ⁎, Andrea Bonezzi Department of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 60208, USA Available online 29 January 2009
Abstract Yoon, Cole and Lee's review suggests two strategies to address elderly individuals' limitations in processing information and decision making. One is accommodation, which entails designing information processing and judgment tasks so that they are compatible with the elderly's resource limitations. The other strategy involves stimulating self-regulation. Here the premise is that elderly individuals often have the resources necessary to engage in a task, but only activate them in response to explicit directions. We discuss whether this observation reflects older individuals' inability to activate self-regulation strategies spontaneously, or their purposive rationing of their limited resources so they remain available for more profound activities. © 2008 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Yoon, Cole, and Lee's review suggests several approaches to address elderly adults' cognitive deficits and improve their performance. The one that strategists appear to use most often entails matching the task demands to elderly individuals' reduced resource availability by simplifying task requirements. Jitterbug, for example, is a mobile phone targeted at seniors. It features oversized backlit buttons, bright and large text, loud and clear speaker sounds, along with a 24-hour operator service to help make calls, provide directory assistance and add names to a phone list. This approach is based on the premise that elderly individuals' performance deficits are due to a resource limitation, which implies that their performance can be enhanced by limiting task demands to match their resource availability. We refer to these strategies as accommodation. The weight of evidence leaves little doubt that aging is associated with a decline in cognitive resources, and that older adults experience a resource limitation in relation to their younger counterparts. However, Yoon, Cole, and Lee's review also suggests that a cognitive limitation is not the only factor responsible for elderly people's performance deficits. Indeed, they document that older individuals' poor task performance can reflect a failure to deploy the resources that they do have. This is demonstrated by the fact that older individuals' performance is enhanced by presenting prompts to motivate the activation of the resources needed for task performance. ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (B. Sternthal).
For example, while older consumers may encounter greater difficulty than younger people in mastering the use of devices such as an iPhone, given an appropriate processing strategy and the motivation to employ it, they are likely to exhibit proficiency in its use. A good candidate for such strategies would be the consumer who was described as “older than God and blind as a bat,” who when asked what he thought about the Jitterbug replied that what he really wanted was an iPhone. The premise underlying this approach is that older people have the resources necessary to exhibit good task performance but often fail to apply them. The prescription for enhancing elderly people's task performance in this situation is to stimulate the activation and effective application of the resources they do have. We refer to these strategies as stimulation of self-regulation. The purpose of this comment is to offer an analysis of the elderly's decision making that elaborates on issues raised by Yoon, Cole, and Lee. Their review identifies strategies that consumers, marketers and policy makers can implement to improve the fit between the resources required by a task and those available to the elderly. As a starting point in developing our analysis, we recast the strategies they propose to achieve fit into the two categories we have described: accommodation and stimulation of self-regulation. We start by briefly summarizing the strategies discussed by Yoon, Cole, and Lee that can be subsumed under the accommodation approach. Then we present a more detailed assessment of strategies to stimulate selfregulation. We document that some of the elderly's performance
1057-7408/$ - see front matter © 2008 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2008.12.004
24
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deficits described by Yoon, Cole, and Lee are also found in younger populations, and we employ insights derived from the theoretical accounts developed to explain these deficits to suggest strategies that might enhance elderly individuals' learning and task performance. The evidence marshaled by Yoon, Cole, and Lee in support of the assertion that stimulating self-regulation enhances older adults' performance raises a fundamental question: does elderly individuals' failure to allocate the resources necessary to perform certain tasks reflect an inability to activate effective self-regulation strategies spontaneously, or a purposive rationing of their limited resources? We address this question following our discussion of accommodation and stimulation of self-regulation by introducing theorizing on construal level and examining its implications for elderly individual's learning and performance. Accommodation Accommodation is a means of increasing fit that can be achieved using a variety of strategies described by Yoon, Cole, and Lee. One type of accommodation strategy involves adjusting the task demands to match the resources elderly individuals have available. Along these lines, simplified product versions and additional services, such as those developed by Jitterbug, might be offered in order to adapt to reductions in older individuals' working memory. Alternatively, accommodation can be achieved by matching task demands with the elderly individuals' level of resource availability at different times of day: more cognitively demanding tasks might be presented in the morning, whereas less effortful tasks can be reserved for later in the day (May, Hasher, & Stoltzfus, 1993; Yoon, 1997). In some situations, elderly individuals' deficits in learning are attributable to an age-related reduction in the speed with which they process information (Birren, 1974). Providing older people additional time to process information, such as by using self-paced media (print rather than broadcast), should compensate for their diminished speed of processing and enhance their learning (Phillips & Sternthal, 1977). Finally, elderly individuals' decisions appear to rely more on an affective system that is automatic, implicit, and effortless rather than on a deliberative system that is analytical, conscious, and effortful (e.g., Kahneman, 2003). Messages that take into consideration this proclivity are likely to be better processed (Peters et al., 2007). Another type of accommodation involves making use of the extensive knowledge that older individuals have accumulated over time. This might entail taking advantage of factual information possessed by elderly individuals. As Yoon, Cole, and Lee report, older adults were as good as younger individuals in recalling information about grocery prices when actual prices were to be remembered, but not when prices were fabricated and bore little resemblance to the ones experienced in reality (Castel, 2005). Alternatively, accommodation might be achieved by representing information in a manner that is congruent with elderly individuals' schema, that is, in a way that fits people's elaborated cognitive structures. Although cognitive
resources generally decline with age, knowledge not only increases over time, but also becomes more structured and organized in the form of schemas and scripts. Along these lines, Morrow et al. (1996) found that when medication instructions are presented in a way that is compatible with the schema for taking medication that most people possess, compliance with the prescribed regimen is enhanced. In sum, the evidence marshaled by Yoon, Cole, and Lee offers strong support for the notion that older adults experience a resource limitation in relation to their younger counterparts. Accommodating these limitations either by simplifying the task demands or relying on the extensive knowledge that older people do have is judicious. At the same time, the evidence pertaining to accommodation is not conclusive about whether in the absence of accommodation the deficits in task performance exhibited by elderly individuals are the result of a failure to allocate the resources they do have or a resource limitation. Investigations related to stimulation of self-regulation address this issue. Stimulation of self-regulation What accounts for older adults learning and performance deficits? The fact that elderly individuals perform implicit memory tasks as well as their younger counterparts (Fleishmann et al., 2004) suggests that their limitations are unlikely to reflect an inability to encode information. When this observation is combined with the fact that the elderly perform well in recalling information with which they are familiar, the implication is that older people's difficulty in learning and their poor task performance often reflect a failure to engage in the processing strategy that makes relevant information accessible. We refer to this strategy as elaboration. Elaboration involves linking an object to a rich associative network that is already in memory, or connecting bits of information that are encoded from external sources. Elaboration is resource demanding. Nevertheless, the failure of elderly individuals to elaborate on information is unlikely to be due to their diminished cognitive resources because they exhibit an ability to engage in elaboration when given explicit instructions about how to do so. Instructions to form a mental image of a claim (Law, Hawkins, & Craik, 1998) or to justify a decision (Kim et al., 2005) were found to be successful in enhancing older people's learning, whereas simply asking older adults to think deeply did not prompt detailed processing and effective stimulus learning (Cole & Houston, 1987). Support for the contention that a failure to elaborate spontaneously on message information is implicated in elderly individuals' learning and performance deficits is offered by investigations examining older people's processing of communications with an assertion-plus-tag structure. One situation in which this structure is encountered occurs in processing negations (Skurnik et al., 2005). A negation is an affirmation preceded by a negator (e.g., It's not delivery, its DiGiorno; It's not your father's Oldsmobile). Elderly individuals' recall of a negation message is accurate when recall is immediate, but with the passage of time they appear to remember only the
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affirmation and thus make the wrong inference (e.g., DiGiorno is delivery; It's my father's Oldsmobile). This phenomenon has been observed in segments other than the elderly (Gilbert, 1991). One explanation for it is in terms of perceptual fluency (Schwarz, 2004; Skurnik et al., 2005). According to this view, older individuals do not remember whether an assertion was negated or not after a delay because of a decline in explicit memory. But because their implicit memory is strong, they experience the message as being familiar, which leads them to accept the affirmation. Elaboration offers an alternative explanation. Here, the contention is that despite the availability of the negator in memory (as indicated by a directed search of memory using a recall probe), it is not as highly elaborated as the affirmation and thus is less accessible at the time of judgment (Grant, Malaviya, & Sternthal, 2004). This disparity in elaboration is not manifested when recall occurs in close proximity to the presentation of information because the potential reduction in the accessibility of the negator that results from its lack of elaboration is offset by its recency of presentation. However, when the effect of recency is limited by a longer delay between information presentation and recall, the lack of elaboration makes the negator inaccessible. Elderly individuals also exhibit difficulties in processing communications with an assertion-plus-tag structure, where the tag is a spokesperson for a message. In the study reported by Rahhal, May, and Hasher (2002), participants inferred the truth of an affirmation from the knowledge of who presented it: one person presented true assertions and the other person made false ones. For younger people, both the message source and its association with the message were accessible in memory. In contrast, older individuals appeared to use information about the message source to make an on-the-spot inference about the truth of the assertion and then to remember only whether the affirmation was true or not. As a result, elderly individuals were able to recall accurately whether an affirmation was true or false, but they could not accurately identify the source of a true and false affirmation. The difficulties exhibited by elderly people in accessing information about the tag when it is represented by a message source have been investigated in other populations where the phenomenon is referred to as a sleeper effect (Cook & Flay, 1978; Kumkale & Albarracín, 2004). A sleeper effect describes the observation that a message presented by a low credibility source is less persuasive immediately after its presentation than after a delay. These findings are explained by noting that the source is accessible immediately after the message presentation even in the absence of its elaboration by virtue of its recency. Here, the source's lack of credibility undermines the positive impact of an otherwise persuasive message. However, after a delay the assertion but not the source is accessible as a basis for judgment because the assertion was elaborated more extensively. As a result, the impact of the appeal increases. Evidence regarding the processing of an assertion-plus-tag thus suggests that individuals can offset difficulties associated with representing the tag by elaborating on it and integrating its
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content with the assertion during message encoding. One way this might be achieved efficiently is by elaborating on the assertion in a manner that also represents the information contained in the tag. When the tag is a low credibility source, the information contained in the assertion could be encoded as false, thus eliminating the need to remember the message source when a judgment is later rendered. In a similar fashion, when the tag is a negator, individuals can integrate that information into their assessment of the assertion, perhaps by converting the negation into an affirmation. Along these lines, “It's not delivery; it's DiGiorno” might be encoded as “DiGiorno is as good as delivery.” The notion that elderly individuals, learning and performance deficits are sometimes the result of a failure to engage in elaboration spontaneously suggests that external prompts to elaborate on stimulus information should enhance their performance. As we discussed earlier, detailed instructions on how to engage in elaboration are helpful in guiding older people not only to recruit available resources, but also to use them effectively. Along the same lines, experts exhibit an ability to offset deficits associated with aging by taking notes (Morrow et al., 2003). Apparently, this activity provides a means of elaboration that enhances the representation of associations in memory as well as freeing working memory to process other information. Pictorial stimuli have also been shown to improve the memory of older adults, resulting in the same level of recognition as that observed in younger adults, even after intervals of a month (Park et al., 1988). Viewed from an elaboration perspective, pictorial information enhances learning by facilitating the development of a rich associative network (Kisielius & Sternthal, 1986). One additional approach to stimulating elaboration among elderly individuals warrants mention. Evidence suggests that a positive disposition toward being elderly enhances their memory performance. As Yoon, Cole, and Lee note, presenting positive stereotypes of the elderly stimulated better learning among older adults than did negative stereotypes (Hess, 2005). Similarly, it seems plausible that superior memory performance exhibited by Chinese elderly in relation to their American counterparts is attributable to the greater positive regard typically accorded to older Chinese adults (Levy & Langer, 1994). The prevailing explanation for these findings is that contexts such as memory tests activate stereotypes (e.g., memory declines with age) that either increase elderly individuals' anxiety or decrease the effort they devote to the task (Steele, 1997). In either event, the result is poor memory performance (see Hess, 2005 for a review). However, it is also plausible that the presence of positive affect enhances performance by stimulating elaboration. Pleasant feelings have been shown to facilitate the association of seemingly unrelated objects (Isen, Daubman, & Nowicki, 1987; Roehm & Sternthal, 2001). These associations provide an elaborative network that facilitates the accessibility of stimulus information. Moreover, positive affect has been found to prompt a focus on performing work that is important to do rather than pleasant to do, and thus might induce the elderly to attend
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critical elements of a task rather than ones they enjoy (Isen & Reeve, 2005). These observations suggest that the elderly often have the resources necessary to represent the information on which judgments are to be made in memory. Their poorer learning and performance in relation to younger adults is thus a matter of not activating the strategies that prompt an elaboration of the information on which an informed judgment can be made. This conclusion raises the question of why elderly people do not use the resources they have available to invoke elaboration. Self-regulation failure or purposive rationing of limited resources? An important insight emerging from Yoon, Cole, and Lee's review is that age-related performance deficits are often attributable not to a limitation in resources, but to a failure to self-regulate. Whether this failure is attributable to older adults' inability to activate and apply the resources they do have, a deliberate rationing of their resources, or both of these factors, is not resolved by the available evidence. However, emerging theorizing related to construal level theory (CLT) offers some insight about how the investigation of this question might proceed. CLT is based on the notion that individuals represent events at different levels, ranging from abstract high-level construals that capture the de-contextualized, global, superordinate, primary features of an event to low-level construals that capture contextualized, local, subordinate, secondary features (Trope & Liberman, 2003; for a review see Trope, Liberman, & Wakslak, 2007). For example, the act of voting might be construed as supporting democracy (high-level construal) or checking a box on a form in a voting booth (low-level construal; Vallacher & Wegner, 1989). Furthermore, when people construe events at a high level of abstraction, they tend to focus on the achievement of long-term self-regulatory goals, whereas when they adopt a low-level construal they tend to focus on the achievement of short-term self-regulatory goals (Fujita et al., 2006). The relevance of construal level in explaining the effects of aging on task performance has emerged recently in a study documenting a relationship between people's chronic construal level and their age. The finding suggests that older people have a tendency to represent information at a higher level of construal than younger individuals (Hong, 2008). For example, Hong reports that older people interpret a word meaning “whipping school children” (dippoldism) as misconduct, whereas younger people take it to mean something more concrete — a spanking (McGinnis & Zelinski, 2000). The implication of this observation is that older people are likely to adopt high-level construals that stimulate a focus on abstract self-regulatory goals. Moreover, such a focus is thought to foster self-regulation (Fujita et al., 2006). Why then do older people exhibit what appears to be a failure to evoke spontaneously those strategies that would facilitate learning and task performance? These outcomes may reflect the fact that while older individuals are focused on abstract goals, they only pursue them if they feel they are worthwhile attaining.
When they are not worthwhile, they engage in resource conservation. This line of reasoning suggests two alternative strategies to enhance the performance of elderly consumers. One is to take advantage of elderly individuals' proclivity toward focusing on higher-order goals as a basis for self-regulation by ensuring that these goals are relevant. For example, as we discussed earlier, older adults exhibited poorer performance than their younger counterparts when the task was to learn unrealistic prices, but no age differences were found when prices were realistic (Castel, 2005). An alternative strategy is to prompt a consideration of low-level construals by directing older individuals' to follow step-by-step decision-making procedures. As noted earlier, there is evidence that providing instructions to elaborate on message information by forming a mental image (Law et al., 1998) or by developing a justification for their decision (Kim et al., 2005) enhances elderly adults' learning. Conclusion The evidence reviewed by Yoon, Cole, and Lee suggests it is premature to conclude that the deficits exhibited by elderly individuals are necessarily either a matter of resource limitations, or an inability to allocate the resources they do have. To understand whether such deficits are purposive it seems worthwhile to assess whether construal level mediates the effects of age on task performance. If construal level accounts for elderly individuals' preferred means of self-regulation, their level of construal can be varied based on an assessment of which level is more likely to enhance the elderly's consideration of relevant information on which to base a decision (Fujita et al., 2006). On the one hand, when elderly individuals perceive a task to be at odds with their high-level goals, task performance could be enhanced by inducing a low-level construal, using devices such as having people focus on how an activity is performed, or prompting them to adopt a proximate time perspective. On the other hand, when the higher order goals achieved by a task fit with older people's orientation, the highlevel construal that they spontaneously adopt might be the preferred means of stimulating good performance. In this case, older adults' high-level construal could be reinforced by prompting a focus on why an activity is performed, or by stimulating a distal temporal orientation (Trope et al., 2007). Our analysis of the evidence presented by Yoon, Cole, and Lee suggests that fit between elderly adults' abilities and task demands might be achieved by introducing devices that promote the activation of the appropriate level of self-construal or for that matter other means of self-regulation. Support for this line of reasoning would suggest that at least some of the elderly's limitations are a matter of self-regulatory choice rather than a result of limitations in the ability to self-regulate that are known to accompany aging. The proposed account raises the question of why elderly people exhibit a tendency to adopt high-level construals. There are several plausible rationales for this proclivity. It may be that high-level construals are adopted because they accommodate older adults' resources limitations by offering a less effortful
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