Sixty Is the New Fifty?!
🧠 Psych - 232/300
Hey,
Here’s an compelling research that I came across while reading an article that was titled as “Sixty Is the New Fifty”.
Before you read on, do you agree or disagree?
For this study, the researchers examined information gathered from almost 15,000 German men and women between the ages of 40 and 85. These statistics were gathered as part of a larger investigation into ageing in Germany.
The researchers recorded each participant's birth year, chronological age, subjective age, and several details about their lifestyle and health in order to test their hypotheses.
The findings revealed a fairly wide range of subjective ages at each birth year. In other words, some people feel younger than they actually are, while others feel older and still feel their real age. This is exactly what the researchers anticipated; the result was not unexpected.
Excerpt from the original article -
“However, the researchers’ hypothesis was that subjective age bias is increasing historically. That is, they predicted that older people nowadays would feel even younger than older people of previous decades did. To test this hypothesis, the researchers divided the participants into three cohorts, those born in the years 1911-1935, 1936-1951, and 1952-1974.
In doing so, the researchers found that subjective age bias has indeed increased with each successive cohort.
For instance, let’s take age 65 as our benchmark.
On average, those in the 1911-1935 cohort reported that they felt on average about five years younger than their actual age.
Those in the 1936-1951 cohort averaged a subjective age bias of eight years.
And those in the youngest cohort, born between 1952-1974 said they felt 11 years younger than their actual age on average.”
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What do I need to know?
Age discrimination is one explanation, as already mentioned. Modern culture is fascinated by youth. There may be a temptation to misrepresent one's age, particularly for older adults who don't appear their age.
Acting younger than your actual age has a downside, as the researchers note, but the upside is that you may prevent age discrimination.
However, you run the risk of missing out on important social opportunities with your age group, with whom you undoubtedly share more interests.
There’s one caveat though. These participants were all German citizens, who all resided in a wealthy nation with a robust social safety net and universal healthcare, which the researchers acknowledge is a weakness in the current study.
This implies that less developed nations may not be able to use the current findings. The findings do, however, indicate that if you're financially secure and in generally good health, you'll probably feel younger than your actual age well into your senior years.
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