Older and Younger Job Seekers on LinkedIn: Similar Techniques, Different Outcomes

In today’s recruitment practices, the use of social networking sites (SNS) like LinkedIn is omnipresent. In fact, SNS have become the main medium through which organizations advertise jobs, recruit, and screen future employees. Likewise, millions of job seekers use SNS to present their skills and make themselves attractive to organizations.

This practice may put some job seekers in a disadvantaged position. Navigating SNS and creating an attractive and professional-looking profile on LinkedIn requires specific skills and knowledge which may be a barrier for those individuals who have not grown up with the Internet or social media. Indeed, not having grown up with the Internet and encountering social media later in adulthood often goes along with a lower skill level when navigating and actively using SNS but also with more skepticism and uneasiness about online self-presentation in general. Therefore, older job seekers may be less proficient in creating and promoting their LinkedIn profiles than younger job seekers, which may in turn lower their chances of employment.

We analyzed how younger and older job seekers present themselves on LinkedIn and how successful their presentation styles were for receiving job offers through LinkedIn. Younger job seekers who participated in our study were in their late twenties, so-called digital natives who were “born into a wired world.” Social media are at the heart of the way members of this age group communicate, learn, work, play, and shop. Older job seekers who participated in our study were in their fifties. Thus, they were in their 40s when the major SNS like LinkedIn and Facebook were launched. Moreover, they were not exposed to computers or the Internet until late adolescence or young adulthood.

First, we analyzed our participants’ LinkedIn profiles in detail and compared them. We focused on those profile sections that recruiters pay most attention to, namely the “about” section, the skills and competencies section, the network connections, the recommendations, and the profile photo. Then, we analyzed how the way older and younger job seekers presented themselves in these sections was related to the number of job offers they had received.

The Good News

The comparison of profiles revealed many similarities and few differences between younger and older job seekers. For example, younger and older job seekers mentioned about the same number of professional qualities in the “about” sections, using about the same number of words. Moreover, they mentioned roughly the same number and type of soft and technical skills in the “skills” section and had a similar number of recommendations. And their profile photos were perceived as relatively professional.

The few differences that emerged were in favor of older job seekers’ profiles: Older job seekers had larger networks, meaning more connections, and more skill endorsements than younger job seekers. And they used profile pictures with more advantageous cutouts, showing more of the face in relation to the body.

In sum, these comparisons show that older job seekers are just as proficient or, in some respects, even more proficient in creating and promoting their profile on LinkedIn. This observation is encouraging because it refutes concern that older adults are less versed in using professional SNS.

The Bad News

However, looking at employment outcomes was less encouraging. Irrespective of profile qualities, older job seekers received significantly fewer job offers through LinkedIn than younger job seekers. That is, despite comparable—or in some respects better—online profiles, older job seekers did not receive comparable employment opportunities. Older job seekers were better connected and received more skill endorsements, showing that other professionals deemed it worthwhile to connect with them and give them credit for their competencies. Yet, older job seekers were still disadvantaged at recruitment.

Only one aspect helped counteract the age discrimination: When older job seekers used a profile photo in which they looked younger than they actually were. In other words, the younger the older job seekers were on their profile photo, they more likely they were to receive job offers through LinkedIn.

In sum, age discrimination persists at employment, including in the online realm. Furthermore, age discrimination is evident in the powerful impact of the job seeker’s photo. In spite of their strong qualities, older job seekers received fewer employment opportunities than younger job seekers, and only having a younger-looking photo helped compensate for the bias. Thus, older job seekers’ older looks on their profile photo played an important role in explaining the fact that they received fewer employment opportunities.

These findings have practical implications. While photos have been banned from classical resumes for good reasons, they have remarkably found a way back into the recruitment process through SNS. Our results imply that it is time to also ban them from SNS. The absence of profile photos may also help increase recruiters’ attention to the specific content of the profiles and hence to information that is more relevant for finding the right person for the job. Our finding that older job seekers are just as proficient in crafting their professional online personas as younger job seekers is particularly encouraging. It implies that the use of SNS is not per se an obstacle and hence does not create an unfair disadvantage for older age cohorts. Thus, banning profile photos from SNS may be an important step forward in transforming the use of SNS in online recruitment into an age-fair practice.


For Further Reading

Krings, F., Gioaba, I., Kaufmann, M., & Zebrowitz, L. (2021). Older and younger job seekers’ impression management on LinkedIn: Similar strategies, different outcomes.  Journal of Personnel Psychology, 20, 61-74. https://doi.org/10.1027/1866-5888/a000269

Kaufmann, M., Krings, F., Zebrowitz, L. & Sczesny, S. (2017). Age bias in selection decisions: The role of facial appearance and fitness impressions. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 2065. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02065


Franciska Krings is a Full Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Lausanne. She studies how diversity affects the way people behave in organizations, particularly how stereotypes influence personnel decision making as well as how to combat such biases.

 

Going Through Dark Times: Machiavellianism Across the Life Span

Teenagers can be a real handful—rebellious, impulsive, selfish, manipulative.  At times it’s hard to recognize the adorable children that they were just a few years before. But all is not lost. In a recent research project with Wiebke Bleidorn and Jason Rentfrow, I analyzed personality data from more than 1.1 million people from all around the world and found that, as people grow older, they mellow out and become more socially mature. Until they retire, that is.

But let’s back up a little. Our personalities not only define who we are but also influence virtually all important things in our lives—including what kind of jobs we do (and how successful we are at them), who we date and marry, what we spend our money on, and how much of it we save, and when and how we die. For many years, psychologists believed that personalities are set like plaster: once a rebel, always a rebel. But, in the past 10 years or so, a fast-growing number of studies, often with large samples and longitudinal data, have shown that it is not quite as simple as that. Rather, when it comes to personality across the lifespan, we see both stability and change in people’s characteristics.

Importantly, almost all studies that have investigated personality development across the lifespan have looked at neutral or positive traits, especially the Big Five personality traits—agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, emotional stability, and openness to experience. Meanwhile, nobody had looked at developmental trends in the dark side of personality.

To change this, we partnered up with TIME Magazine to run an online study that reached more than 1.1 million people worldwide. In doing so, we had a little help from Harry Potter—but that is a different story. Suffice to say, the study was fairly popular and produced a large dataset on several personality characteristics, including Machiavellianism, which refers to manipulative personality. Machiavellianism is named after the 16th-century Italian diplomat, Niccolò Machiavelli, who unapologetically advocated the use of deceitful, immoral, and cruel behaviors as a way to maintain political power. Psychologists became interested in this trait when they realized that Machiavelli’s advice is still alive and kicking, and ordinary people today act in manipulative, deceitful, and underhanded ways to varying degrees in their daily lives. So here we had our dark trait.

Using people’s individual scores on a measure of Machiavellianism, we charted how Machiavellianism differed across age groups in our sample. As we had at least 1000 participants for every age year between 10 and 67, we could look at fine-grained differences in how Machiavellianism changes with age.

Here’s what we found:

  1. As people enter puberty, they become more reckless, cunning, and exploitative, with peaks in Machiavellianism at age 16, at the height of adolescence.
  2. Thankfully, this appears to be only temporary, and as people transition into adulthood, they largely shift back toward greater decency, kindness, and sociability. According to social investment theory, one important trigger for this personality maturation involves the demands and expectations of new social roles that come with adulthood, such as entering the workforce, marrying, and becoming a parent. As people solidify their identities and social roles, this trend toward lower Machiavellianism continues throughout adulthood until people’s mid-sixties, when Machiavellianism reaches its overall low point in life.
  3. But then—perhaps surprisingly—right after age 65, we see a steep uptick in Machiavellianism. There is little research on this, and our data do not speak to any age trends past 67, so we can only speculate about what might lead people to become more Machiavellian after 65. Of course, 65 is a common marker for retirement in many countries, so one possibility is that, once they stop working, people no longer need to be as nice as before, or perhaps they no longer have the energy to be nice. But the all-time low in Machiavellianism at age 65 could be just an outlier that reflects the initial excitement that comes with the freedom of retirement, and people bounce back to their usual Machiavellianism levels after that.
  4. Women are nicer—period. Although men and women both experience the fluctuations in Machiavellianism described above, at every age women score lower on Machiavellianism than men.
  5. Being an a***** can pay off. Notwithstanding these age-related trends, which can be found across all income groups, throughout the lifespan, people who earn more money consistently show higher levels of Machiavellianism than those with lower incomes.

Taken together, if you have teenage kids, or are a teenager yourself, don’t worry: for all we know, you will be fine. When it comes to Machiavellianism in old age, however, we still know fairly little, and more work needs to be done. That being said, In the meantime, you might want to keep an eye on Grandpa.


For Further Reading

Götz, F. M., Bleidorn, W., & Rentfrow, P. J. (2020). Age differences in Machiavellianism across the life span: Evidence from a large‐scale cross‐sectional study. Journal of Personality, 88, 978–992. doi:10.1111/jopy.12545

Paulhus, D. L., & Williams, K. M. (2002). The dark triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36, 556–563. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0092-6566(02)00505-6

Roberts, B. W., & Mroczek, D. (2008). Personality trait change in adulthood. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 31–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2008.00543.x

Soto, C. J., & Tackett, J. L. (2015). Personality traits in childhood and adolescence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24, 358–362. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637 21415 589345
 

Friedrich M. Götz is currently writing his doctoral dissertation in psychology at the University of Cambridge. He is glad that most of his own encounters with Machiavellianism happen only when he is analyzing his research data.

Neil Hester

Neil Hester is a postdoctoral scholar with Eric Hehman's Seeing Human Laboratory at McGill University in Montreal. Prior to joining the lab in 2019, Neil received his PhD at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, working with Kurt Gray and Keith Payne. He studies how key social categories such as race, gender, and age intersect and interact with contextual factors to predict stereotyping and discrimination, as well as how moral psychology might adopt insights from social cognition and other areas of psychology to improve generalizability. 
 

What advice do you have for individuals pursuing a career in social psychology?
 
Be prepared to be rejected a lot! I have become much better at accepting rejection and not viewing any individual failure as a reflection of my own abilities. A big part of accepting failure is remembering that short-term results can actually be pretty random (like patterns in small data sets). If you experience some early failures, this is not evidence that you are “not smart enough” for research—believe in yourself, take care of yourself, and keep working. This is especially important for young graduate students, who have no long-term patterns to observe and may not be used to receiving such negative outcomes and feedback.
 
This topic makes me think of the Philadelphia 76ers, a storied NBA franchise that has lost a LOT of games in the last 8-10 years. In 2014, the organization adopted “trust the process” as their guiding principle, ignoring present outcomes in favor of good practices. The next year, they lost over 90% of their games. But, earlier this year, they almost defeated the Toronto Raptors (who went on to win the championship) in the playoffs. Trust the process.
 
 
What do you enjoy most about teaching?
 
In social psychology, we are uniquely privileged to teach on topics such as first impressions, prejudice, attraction, social pressure, and other topics that are highly relatable to students (and people in general). It is really gratifying to watch students “make sense” of some of their own experiences throughout the semester through this lens. Why do I dress this way or act this way at parties? Why do I have the friends that I have? What are the specific reasons that people treat me differently because of my identity? These are all big, interesting questions that social psychology speaks to.
 
Also, I really enjoy putting together the course syllabus. When you make a syllabus, you get to take all of your favorite topics, anecdotes, and activities and arrange them in the order that makes the most sense for both the students and for yourself. A great syllabus sets expectations for the semester and has a big impact on the success of the class.
 

What are your current research interests?
 
I research person perception with a focus on two closely related topics: intersectionality and identity-moderated face perception. Intersectionality—the idea that different identities interlock to yield unique experiences and perceptions (e.g., being/judging a Black woman or a gay man)—is definitely a hot topic in social psychology right now. I am really interested in gaining a better understanding of how and why some groups experience disproportionate discrimination. In some cases, the answer might be counterintuitive: I currently have a paper in press with Keith Payne, Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi and Kurt Gray that uses statistical modeling to show how intersectional patterns of discrimination (e.g., Black men being disproportionately stopped by police) can emerge from simple stereotypes (e.g., main effects of race and gender on perceived threat) without an actual intersectional stereotype. This kind of work will hopefully be useful for developing accurate and parsimonious theories of intersectionality.
 
I also think that there’s a lot of value in taking a broader view of “what counts” as an identity that meaningfully intersects with other identities. Take height as an example. For a long time, researchers assumed that being tall was implicitly assumed to be race-neutral. Kurt Gray and I published a paper about how being tall increases judgments of competence for White male targets but increases judgments of threat for Black male targets, which helps explain why racial disparities in NYPD police stops were even larger for tall men than for short men. 
 
My work on identity-moderated face perception closely relates to my intersectionality work. For example, some people’s neutral/resting facial expressions look more negative than other people’s (this is colloquially referred to as “resting bitch face”/RBF). Are the consequences of this the same for female and male faces? Not really: female faces high in RBF are primarily seen as less attractive, whereas male faces high in RBF are primarily seen as more threatening. One of my current projects with Eric Hehman’s lab suggests the basic structure of face perception differs based on gender. In general, his lab does a lot of great work highlighting how complex and heterogeneous face perception is across different perceivers and targets—even for findings once thought to be pretty generalizable. 
 
 
What led to your current research interests?
 
As an undergraduate, I was interested in various topics that had a moral component to them: religious prejudice, race politics, and gender politics. I had some trouble figuring out what to do to combine all of these interests; I ultimately decided that applying to moral psychology labs was the best option. Now, I am heading in another direction, broadly studying person perception but also working to integrate theory in moral psychology with theory in person perception and stereotyping.
 

Outside of psychology, how do you like to spend your free time?
 
I still sing in the university choir as a postdoc and I occasionally play the violin and write music with a close friend who’s a singer-songwriter (we published an EP called Sunfall last year). I also play basketball and follow the NBA pretty closely (if that wasn’t clear from the 76ers anecdote earlier). Oh, and I play video games with friends from undergraduate and graduate school. It’s a great way to wind down and keep in touch!
 
 

Stereotypes Undermine Older Adults’ Self-Control

When an aging parent or grandparent gambles more money than he or she intended or snaps at a store clerk, many of us are quick to assume that getting old simply lowers people’s ability to control themselves.  Older adults are viewed as less capable of controlling what they say and do than younger adults. Certainly, our brains and our personalities change as we age.  But the lack of self-control that seniors often seem to show may be grounded as firmly in their social environment as in their brains. 

Across two studies, we examined the effects of negative stereotypes about senior citizens on older adults’ self-control. Our participants, all of them at least 65 years old, were asked to read what they thought were recent news articles.  These were not actual news stories but rather articles that we designed to present our older readers with one of two views of aging. Some participants read that memory declines quickly with age—and that older adults are less able than younger adults to remember what they intended to do. Other participants read that memory is maintained very well across the lifespan—and that older adults are good at remembering their intentions.  A third group of participants read neutral articles about nature.

We then asked all participants whether they would choose to receive a smaller amount of money immediately or a larger amount of money in the future. For example, we asked if participants would rather receive $24 now or wait and receive $35 in 29 days. Being willing to wait for a larger reward instead of settling for an immediate smaller reward reflects better self-control, much like choosing to save money for a much-desired family vacation instead of going out to eat every night.

The seniors who read about declines in memory among older adults—those who were reminded of the negative stereotype—were the least likely of the three groups to choose the larger (delayed) rewards.  In fact, seniors who read that memory declines with age chose the larger future payoff less than a third of the time, whereas seniors who read that memory does not decline with age chose the larger future payoff on average about half the time.

One reason this occurred is that negative stereotypes make older adults feel older in relation to their actual age. Consistent with previous research, most of our participants reported feeling younger than they actually were. However, this effect was reduced among participants who read the article about the negative stereotype.  Exposure to negative stereotypes caused people to feel less young compared with their actual age, and this tendency to feel older predicted worse self-control.

Although age may directly cause poor self-control, these disparities between the old and the young may increase when people are reminded of negative stereotypes about aging.  Negative stereotypes about older adults are can be seen in movies, greeting cards, and even commercials. As a recent example, ETrade’s 2018 Superbowl ad featuring “DJ Nana” mocked the idea of older adults working. 

Research on stereotype threat shows that making people aware of negative stereotypes about their groups can impair their performance. For example, reminding women that other people expect them to perform poorly on a math task can disrupt women’s math performance.  Our research shows that reminding seniors of negative stereotypes about their group can impair their self-control—even when the stereotypes about which seniors are reminded are not specifically about self-control.    

So what can we do? In addition to reducing negative stereotypes about aging, reducing the effect of feeling stereotyped could improve older adults’ self-control. Research has shown that just learning about the effect of stereotypes—like reading this article right now!—may reduce the negative outcomes associated with negative stereotypes. 


For Further Reading

Alquist, J. L., Price, M. M., Hancock, D., Talley, A. E., & Cukrowicz, K. (2018). Exposure to negative stereotypes impairs older adults’ self-control. Self and Identity, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2018.1437069
 

Mindi Price is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Psychological Sciences at Texas Tech University, researching experimental psychology (social), with a focus on how self-control relates to health. 

Jessica Alquist is an Associate Professor at Texas Tech University who studies self-control.
 

The Ten-Year Itch – and How to Scratch It Safely

In 1965, Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques noticed that dozens of creative geniuses lost their mojo just before they turned 40. Jaques pointed out that Bach’s creativity ebbed after he turned 38; Goethe’s genius abandoned him when he was 39; Michelangelo produced little art beyond his late 30s. The same was true of Keats, Shelley, Rimbaud, Chopin, Baudelaire, and dozens of others. This, Jaques explained, was how middle-aged adults responded to the specter of their own deaths: They experienced a “mid-life crisis.” (A product of his time, Jaques focused exclusively on male "geniuses" in his article, though he mentioned that both men and women could experience mid-life crises.)

In the last half century, we have learned that mid-life crises express themselves in different ways for different people, and that some people flourish in the midst of these bursts of self-scrutiny. Though some are threatened by the idea of aging, others take the opportunity to inject their lives with fresh meaning.

I first read Jaques’ article a couple of months before turning 30 and felt some of what he described. I struggled with the sense that time was passing too quickly. To some extent, I questioned the meaningfulness of my life. I dealt with this by adopting a highly meaningful goal: to run my first marathon while raising money for a medical charity. Of course, I hadn’t quite entered “mid-life” yet, so my crisis seemed to have arrived early.  

Several years later, Hal Hershfield and I discussed how my experience as a 29-year-old mapped onto the concept of the mid-life crisis. It made us wonder whether approaching any major milestone in aging – not just midlife – might prompt a great deal of introspection. Because most of the world follows the base-10 number system, we wondered if each new decade of life  starting with age 30 might inspire a fresh crisis of meaning. We decided to search for signs that people question the meaningfulness of their lives shortly before the arrival of a new decade, when their age ends in a nine – 29, 39, 49, 59, and so on. (We called these “nine-ending” ages.)

The evidence mounted across a range of contexts and measures. When thousands of people around the world completed the World Values Survey, a global research project that studies people's values and beliefs, one of the questions asked the extent to which they wondered whether their lives were meaningful. As we expected, people who were “nine-enders” were more likely to report questioning the meaningfulness of their lives. The differences were small, as you’d expect given how many factors drive people to search for meaning, but they were nonetheless statistically significant.

Some of the consequences of introspecting about the meaning of one’s life were positive. For example, people with nine-ending ages were overrepresented among first-time marathon runners, and people who ran multiple marathons ran faster at those ages than they did a year or two earlier or later. Unfortunately, we also found evidence of destructive behavior. The suicide rate rises ever so slightly among nine-enders, and nine-ending males are disproportionately likely to use Ashley Madison, a dating website for people seeking extramarital affairs. (The same may be true of nine-ending women, but we only had access to reliable male data.)

In a follow-up study, we asked some people to imagine the night before they were entering their next decade in age and asked other people to imagine a typical day or the night before a birthday that did not fall at the end of the decade. Those who thought about beginning a new decade were more likely to report searching for and questioning the meaning in their lives.  

As you might imagine, some people experience this crisis a little earlier or later in time. Although these behaviors peak at nine-ending ages, the data pattern looks more like a wave: people’s concerns about meaning start to rise at eight-ending ages, crest at nine-ending ages, and begin to fall at zero-ending ages.

These variations suggest that end-of-decade effects are subtle and vary from person to person. People run marathons and seek extramarital affairs for all sorts of reasons, and the end-of-decade search for meaning plays only a small role in their decisions. Consequently, the effect is sometimes hard to detect. For example, the World Values Survey has been administered six times (the seventh wave is currently under way), and the effect isn’t as strong in some of those waves as in others.

Nonetheless, other researchers have replicated and refined the basic pattern we originally identified. Talya Miron-Shatz and her colleagues found, for example, that people increasingly emphasize broad, long-term facets of health and well-being over momentary happiness as they approach the transition between two decades in age. Jinhyung Kim and his colleagues recently ran the same experiment we ran and found similar results. They noticed that, although people question the meaning in their lives more when they imagine the end of a decade, they don’t necessarily perceive their lives to be more meaningful at those points in life.

These results are important because the behaviors we examined were highly consequential. If people are slightly more likely to seek extramarital affairs or even to end their lives as new decades approach, mental health practitioners and policymakers should be aware of this pattern. If we understand that many people struggle when evaluating their lives, we’re better prepared to encourage them to deal with this struggle constructively rather than destructively—such as by  taking up a new form of exercise, eating healthier foods, saving for retirement, or donating to charitable causes.


For Further Reading

Alter, A. L., & Hershfield, H. E. (2014). People search for meaning when they approach a new decade in chronological age. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 17066-17070.

Miron-Shatz, T., Bhargave, R., & Doniger, G. M. (2015). Milestone age affects the role of health and emotions in life satisfaction: A preliminary inquiry. PLoS One, 10, e0133254.

Kim, J., Schlegel, R. J., Seto, E., & Hicks, J. A. (2019). Thinking about a new decade in life increases personal self-reflection: A replication and reinterpretation of Alter and Hershfield’s (2014) findings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117, e27-e34.

 

Adam Alter is a social psychologist and associate professor of marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business. In his most recent book, Irresistible, he asks why we spend so much time glued to our screens. He turns 39 later this month—and is contemplating his first triathlon.

Personality in Later Life: The Struggle Between Decline and Development

Aging, particularly from the viewpoint of youth, seems boring, depressing, and definitely not sexy. Most research on aging has focused on the physical, mental, and social losses associated with getting old, such as physical limitations, diseases, cognitive impairment, retirement, and the death of people in one’s social circle. The picture is generally one of decline or – at best – maintenance, and for people in the second half of their lives, the future often appears to lack opportunities for continued development.

However, in the last couple of decades, researchers have recast the process of aging as one of development rather than decline. Many have been interested specifically in personality development in later life. What aspects of character change as we age, and in what ways?

Theorist Erik Erikson believed that personality continues to develop throughout adulthood. For example, Erikson proposed that a central change in midlife is the development of either generativity or stagnation, with generativity as the ultimate goal. Generativity involves caring and providing for later generations by doing things such as raising a family, mentoring, or volunteering. Creating things that may benefit future generations, such as gardens or works of art, or, on a grander scale, working to preserve planet Earth are also examples of generativity.

However, all of the stages that make up Erikson’s theory have two poles that represent positive and negative features of that stage. The negative side to generativity’s positive side is stagnation: a lack of caring for others and high self-absorption. Traditionally, research has not focused specifically on stagnation, but examined it as the absence of generativity.

In Erikson’s scheme, the next (and final) stage of life that follows generativity vs. stagnation is ego integrity vs. despair. Ego integrity, the positive side of this stage, involves coming to terms with the life that one has lived, warts and all. Conversely, despair is the inability to accept one’s life, feeling that it has been inadequate, having regrets, and believing that there’s no time left to do anything about those regrets. Coming on the heels of midlife, this stage is usually associated with older age and involves how people deal with the various physical, mental, and social losses associated with aging. And as with generativity, a lot of research has been conducted on ego integrity (the positive angle) with little research on despair (the negative angle).

High levels of generativity and ego integrity each reflect healthy personality development, according to both Erikson and recent research. For instance, researchers have found that generativity peaks in midlife, with higher generativity being associated with satisfaction with life and with successful aging. Likewise, higher ego integrity is also related to life satisfaction, along with lower depression, although its developmental arc into old age has not been examined.

The issue here is that, because most research has folded both the positive and negative sides of each stage together, any potential differences in their levels or patterns of development have been overlooked. Separately examining the positive and negative aspects of each factor can reveal possible differences in the development of generativity and stagnation, and ego integrity and despair, especially any changes that might occur in their development patterns across the adult life span.

In a recent study of generativity/stagnation and ego integrity/despair, Abigail Stewart, Elizabeth Vandewater, and I examined both the positive and negative side of these two factors separately. Specifically, we looked at the separate developmental arcs of generativity, stagnation, ego integrity, and despair over almost 30 years (at ages of 43, 53, 62, and 72) in a group of college-educated women. Overall, we found evidence that these four aspects of personality continue to develop and change at least into people’s seventies (and possibly longer, of course).

Most interesting was that the four facets exhibited different patterns of development. Generativity (the positive side) increased steadily from age 43 and remained high at 72, while stagnation (the negative side) also increased until approximately age 62 but then decreased. These results show that both generativity and stagnation increase well into midlife (and beyond, in the case of generativity) before stagnation decreases, perhaps then allowing generativity to continue to increase.

Similarly, ego integrity increased over the nearly 30-year period with no sign of decrease. But despair decreased more precipitously and at a slightly earlier age than stagnation. This pattern shows that ego integrity and despair are not merely concerns in later life, but are also developing in midlife. And, the interplay between the two suggests that ego integrity, like generativity, eventually ‘bests’ its negative counterpart, despair.

Our work supports Erikson’s idea that each stage of older age involves a tension or struggle between its positive and negative sides, as well as his idea that healthy development is achieved after this period of struggle when the positive side of each factor triumphs. This resolution seems to occur at different ages for the two factors.  Furthermore, the dynamic relationship between the positive and negative aspects of the factors means that looking at them separately over time provides a more accurate picture of when we might arrive at a “healthy” personality.

Perhaps most importantly, as with earlier periods of life, later life can be a period of personality development. So, whether older people volunteer as a teaching assistant in their  grandchildren’s school, take time for themselves, write their tell-all memoir, or finally finish their degree – or all of these things at once – they still have plenty of room to develop and grow.


For Further Reading

Newton, N. J., Stewart, A. J., & Vandewater, E. A. (2019). “Age is opportunity”: Women’s personality trajectories from mid- to later-life. Journal of Research in Personality, 80, 43-54.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2019.04.005

Van Hiel, A., Mervielde, I., & De Fruyt, F. (2006). Stagnation and generativity: Structure, validity, and different relationships with adaptive and maladaptive personality. Journal of Personality, 74(2), 543–573. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2005.00384.x

Westerhof, G. J., Bohlmeijer, E. T., & McAdams, D. P. (2017). The relation of ego integrity and despair to personality traits and mental health. Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological and Social Sciences, 72(3), 400-407. doi: 10.1093/geronb/gbv062

About the Author

Nicky Newton is an assistant professor of psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. She researches adult development and aging, focusing on the relationships between age, gender, social roles, health, and personality.

Emotional Well-Being Improves With Age

People want to be happy. They use phone apps and self-help books to increase happiness and want to know who is happiest.  They compile lists of the happiest countries in the world, the happiest states in the U.S., and the happiest stages in life. People talk about youth as the best years of life. But are people really happiest when they are young?

What do researchers mean by "happy"? Most researchers who study happiness want to know about positive emotions— such as happiness, calmness, contentment, and joy—and negative emotions—such as frustration, anger, sadness, and anxiety. Researchers often combine positive and negative emotions into a measure of overall measure of well-being, and happiness scores generally reflect more positive than negative emotional experiences.

Most research on happiness studies people of different ages at the same moment in time.  This method reveals how different generational cohorts differ from one another, but it cannot tell if individual people change in happiness as they age.  Maybe people who grew up years ago have different expectations or ideas about how they should feel and what they should tell others, and that is why older adults vary from younger adults.  We wanted to know how emotional experiences change over time.

We asked over 2000 people who ranged in age from 24 to 95 years about the emotions they felt every day for eight days.  They also reported the emotions they felt in the past week and in the past month. We asked these questions three times, with about ten years separating each wave of data collection. 

Contrary to the belief that people are happiest when they are young, we found that older people are happiest.  When we asked adults of different ages about their emotions, the oldest in the group often reported the highest levels of happiness and a lower level of negative emotions such as frustration and irritability.

Daily feelings of negative emotions decreased as people aged until they were in their mid-70s. Psychological distress—including feelings such as being so sad that nothing can cheer you up—declined in adulthood, remained fairly stable in mid-life—when people were in their 40s and 50s, and sometimes increased later in life.

When we looked at positive emotions, such as feeling content, cheerful, or excited, we saw a different picture of age. In contrast to cross-sectional studies showing that older adults are the happiest, we found that positive emotions remained fairly stable for people in their twenties and thirties but decreased slightly over time for those midlife and older.

Our study didn't examine why people feel the way they do, but other studies suggest that as people age, they appraise the world as less threatening, and they often focus on the more positive aspects of their lives. These findings provide hope for many people that yes, with age, life does get better.


For Further Reading

Charles, S. T., Rush, J., Piazza, J. R., Cerino, E. S., Mogle, J., & Almeida, D. M. (2023). Growing old and being old: Emotional well-being across adulthood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(2), 455–469. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000453

Carstensen, L. L., & DeLiema, M. (2018). The positivity effect: A negativity bias in youth fades with age. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 19, 7-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2017.07.009


Susan Charles is Professor of Psychological Science and Associate Dean of Academic Programs in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California-Irvine. Her research examines social and emotional processes across the adult life span, and how these processes are related to differences in cognitive and physical and mental health.

Who Is Wise?

Navigating through life is difficult and complicated. Problems often lack simple, well-defined solutions and instead require balancing myriad interests and caveats. To solve problems in real life, people call upon wisdom and seek those who are wise. Unlike someone who is just smart, a wise person is experienced in life and understands the human condition, knows how to balance multiple perspectives and interests, and is motivated to pursue truth and the common good. But who is wise? Does the proverbial "old sage" hold some truth to it? Do intelligent people have an edge in becoming wise? Most importantly, does wisdom really help people live a good life? Are wise people indeed happier?

These questions have been studied by many researchers. However, because different studies define and measure wisdom in different ways, and because any single study is limited, findings vary across studies. As a way to go beyond individual studies and to look at the big picture, we used a statistical technique called meta-analysis. It allowed us to summarize thirty years of empirical research on wisdom to answer important questions like those posed above. Here's what we found.

Must One Wait Until Old Age to Be Wise?

Old age itself does not bring wisdom. Wisdom increases very little (almost negligibly) with increasing age. On the contrary, wisdom declines in old age, which might be due to a general decline in cognitive abilities. Experts who study wisdom agree that life experiences and how one makes sense of them, rather than age itself, lead to the development of wisdom. For this reason, although some people may grow wiser with age, wisdom requires cultivation and is not an automatic benefit of advancing years.

Are Smarter People Wiser?

Intelligence is not related to how wisely people report they typically think, feel, and act in daily life. However, intelligent people tend to give wiser advice for especially challenging dilemmas (however, we don't know if they actually act as wisely when facing such dilemmas themselves). Even so, our previous work suggests that wisdom requires only average intelligence--beyond that intelligence ceases to matter. The type of intelligence also matters for wisdom. Crystallized intelligence, which relies on knowledge gained in the real world, is more strongly associated with wisdom than fluid intelligence, which is the ability to solve problems without previous knowledge.

Who Then is Wise?

If age and intelligence, two obvious candidates for characteristics of wise people, do not consistently predict wisdom, what does? The personality trait of openness is related to wisdom across studies. In other words, wisdom entails flexibility in thinking, the tendency and willingness to take on different ideas and perspectives, and an exploratory orientation in life. The association between wisdom and openness is one of the most consistent findings in the literature. Many experts think that openness fosters wisdom.

Are Wiser People Happier?

Finally, wise people lead lives that are both happy and meaningful. People who report thinking, feeling, and acting wisely in daily life feel more positive emotions, less negative emotions, and more satisfaction with their lives. In addition, they are more autonomous (that is, they rely on their personal standards and do not look to others for approval), feel more masterful of their environment, have more positive interpersonal relationships, are more self-accepting, are more oriented towards growth, and feel more purpose and meaning in life. Being growth oriented and feeling more purpose and meaning in life also predict the ability to think of wise solutions to real or hypothetical dilemmas. Contrary to the idiom 'ignorance is bliss', wisdom is its own path to happiness.


For Further Reading

Dong, M., Weststrate, N. M., & Fournier, M. A. (2023). Thirty years of psychological wisdom research: What we know about the correlates of an ancient concept. Perspectives on Psychological Science18(4), 778-811. doi: 10.1177/17456916221114096

Dong, M., & Fournier, M. A. (2022). What are the necessary conditions for wisdom? Examining intelligence, creativity, meaning-making, and the Big Five traits. Collabra: Psychology8(1), 33145. doi: 10.1525/collabra.33145


Mengxi Dong is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Beijing Normal University. Her research focuses on wisdom and understanding the discrepancies among measurements of the same constructs.

Nic M. Weststrate is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago. His research focuses on the development, manifestation, and transmission of wisdom across the lifespan and between generations.

Marc A. Fournier is a Full Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. His research focuses on personality integration, person × situation interactions, and interpersonal processes and dynamics.

Getting the Boot and the Cold Shoulder?

Many people know how tough it can be to find a job, but have you ever considered the social consequences of being unemployed? Compared to those who are employed, unemployed people tend to be more easily viewed as lazy or lacking motivation. Being viewed like this by others may have a strong impact on the social experiences unemployed people have.

Especially for young adults, for whom entering the workforce often involves achieving economic independence, unemployment may come with additional challenges. For instance, unemployed people may expect others to preemptively judge them for having no job and they may expect interactions with others to go badly. Because of that, unemployed people may experience being socially excluded more often than others. Social exclusion could include, for instance, being left out of a group activity or being ignored in a conversation.

No doubt everyone knows what exclusion feels like. So why should we care about one group's exclusion experiences in particular? In the past 20 years, a large body of research has discovered that social exclusion is not just a bummer for your social life but it can take a heavy toll on people's mental well-being and have far-reaching consequences. What is still less known is who in the general population is more at risk of experiencing social exclusion and, therefore, more likely to suffer from these negative consequences.

A Person's Age Really Matters

Because work is an important part of many people's lives, my colleagues and I compared how frequently unemployed and employed adults report being socially excluded in two large survey studies from Germany and New Zealand. In both countries, unemployed individuals reported that they felt more like outsiders and experienced social exclusion more frequently – particularly those who were younger. An additional study conducted in the UK replicated these findings and found that unemployed compared to employed young adults also see their work lives filled with fewer future opportunities. On top of that, expecting to be stigmatized by others due to one's unemployment went hand in hand with more frequent social exclusion experiences.

In sum, our analyses show that young, unemployed adults are particularly vulnerable to being ignored and excluded by others. Feeling isolated and excluded can lead to negative emotions, frustration, and self-doubt, making it even more challenging for unemployed people to bounce back and find a job. Possibly, it may become a cycle that's hard to break. But it's time to challenge these stereotypes and offer support instead of blame.

Creating Positive Change

Okay, let's talk solutions! As first described by Marie Jahoda in 1983, employment offers benefits that go far beyond financial compensation. Losing one's employment includes changes in people's perceived purpose, daily structure, and contacts outside of their families. Programs providing assistance to unemployed people should therefore tackle all these aspects, combining job training, career counseling, and mentorship. Equipping unemployed people with the skills and support they need might thus increase their chances of securing employment.

Unity in Community

Communities play a crucial role in supporting unemployed young adults. As proposed by researchers from the University of Giessen, helping newly unemployed individuals in developing work-related goals and creating a path on how to reach them may shift their perspective of how many possibilities they have left in their work lives. Especially for younger people, who may be unemployed for the first time in their lives, spaces such as networking events where people can connect with others facing similar challenges, may be especially beneficial. As communities, we can build support systems that understand unemployed individuals' experiences and fosters a sense of belonging.

Embracing Inclusion

More generally, these findings stress the importance of creating an inclusive society. Awareness of at-risk groups and the possible consequences present the first steps in breaking the cycle of social exclusion and ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive. By coming together, we can offer support and demonstrate that no one should feel left out or unwanted. Together, we can create an environment where everyone feels valued and has the chance to succeed.

Let's be the change and support our unemployed young adults on their journey to finding employment and belonging.


For Further Reading

Albath, E. A., Büttner, C. M., Rudert, S. C., Sibley, C. G., & Greifeneder, R. (2023). Young, unemployed, excluded: Unemployed young adults report more ostracism. European Journal of Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2953


Elianne Albath is a Social Psychology researcher at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and studies social exclusion experiences in the general population.

Millennials Versus Boomers

From "OK Boomer" and Twitter's satiric #BoomerAdvice to books about the so-called "Me, Me, Me" generation and corporate training on "how to manage Millennial workers," today's public discourse is full of generational narratives, often framed as clashes between Baby Boomers (people born between 1946 and 1964) and Millennials (people born between 1981 and 1996).

But are these antagonistic narratives just superficial banter, or are members of the two largest U.S. generations really in conflict? And if so, why? And what can we do about it? We explored these questions in three studies. Here's what we found!

Do Baby Boomers and Millennials Really Dislike Each Other?

We asked participants from both generations how they felt toward the four adult generations in the United States: Millennials, Generation X, Baby Boomers, and the Silent Generation. Across three studies, Millennial participants consistently reported liking Baby Boomers the least of all generations and identified them as most threatening to their own generation's interest.

Conversely, Baby Boomers liked Millennials the least and found them most threatening to their own interests. Thus, beyond the media frenzy, Millennials and Baby Boomers do seem to harbor mutual animosity.

Where Does This Mutual Animosity Come From?

Our data suggest that, although both generations see the other unfavorably, the nature of their concerns is distinct. Baby Boomers feel that Millennials threaten traditional American values. They believe that this younger generation's worldviews differ vastly from theirs, and that the spread of these views puts at risk the more traditional values Baby Boomers hold dear. This is what we call symbolic concerns.

On the other hand, our data suggest that Millennials feel that Baby Boomers hamper their life prospects. As this older generation lives longer, defers retirement, and retains powerful economic and political roles, Millennials fear that Baby Boomers are refusing to pass the baton, blocking Millennials' shot at power and wealth accumulation. These concerns are probably exacerbated by economic setbacks that have saddled Millennials with vast debts and rising expenses, hindering their ability to establish themselves and live as prosperously as previous generations at the same age. This is what we call realistic (as in, tangible) concerns.

Baby Boomers' symbolic concerns and Millennials' realistic concerns, in turn, drive each generation's animosity toward—and stereotyping of—the other generation.

What Can You Do About It?

First, keep in mind that, although generational narratives are widespread, they have little to no basis in science. That's right: There's no scientific evidence that Millennials are lazier or Baby Boomers more stubborn! After reviewing more than 30 years of academic research on the topic, the National Academies of Sciences have concluded that generational boundaries are arbitrary and that alleged generational differences—when not entirely made-up—reflect mostly situational and life stage differences, not specific personality traits shared by members of an entire generation. For instance, younger generations are not "living in their parent's basement" because they are lazy. They do so because they are staying in school longer, coping with rising student debt, marrying later, and facing a tougher housing market than prior generations at the same age.

So, if you are a Millennial (or Gen-Z), keep in mind that you will also be older one day. As we live longer, healthier lives, the need to prepare for lengthier post-retirement years will likely push you, too, to leave the workforce later than you might have otherwise. And if you are a Baby Boomer, don't forget that depictions of your generation's values when you were young were not much different from those of Millennials today. After all, the popular portrait of today's young as lazy, entitled, and brainwashed by social media is not far astray from the 1960s' caricature of young Boomers as indolent, weed-smoking hippies naïvely protesting the Vietnam war with peace and love signs instead of trying to find a job.

In fact, when our research participants learned that generational narratives about Millennials and Baby Boomers were unfounded and were reminded that they will be (or were) one day the other generation's age, both Millennials and Baby Boomers reported less fear and animosity toward members of the other generation.

This finding highlights an important lesson: Media professionals, corporate trainers, pollsters, consultants, and the public at large should carefully weigh the cost of promoting unfounded generational narratives. Wealth inequalities between younger and older adults have greatly increased, major societal issues divide generations (abortion, presidential elections), and important intergenerational challenges are arising (climate change, future insolvency of Social Security). In this context, promoting popular narratives that antagonize artificial generational groups creates an "us-versus-them" mentality that can undermine the intergenerational solidarity our increasingly age-diverse society desperately needs.


For Further Reading

Francioli, S. P., Danbold, F., & North, M. S. (2023). Millennials versus Boomers: An asymmetric pattern of realistic and symbolic threats drives intergenerational tensions in the United States. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672231164203

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2020). Are generational categories meaningful distinctions for workforce management? National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25796

Francioli, S. P., & North, M. S. (2021). Youngism: The content, causes, and consequences of prejudices toward younger adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001064


Stéphane P. Francioli is a postdoctoral researcher at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He studies age and gender inequalities in society and in the workplace.

Felix Danbold is an assistant professor at University College London School of Management. He studies resistance to growing diversity in society and organizations.

Michael S. North is an assistant professor of Management and Organizations at New York University Stern School of Business. He studies the challenges faced by an aging and increasingly multigenerational workforce.