by Jeff Grabmeier, OSU at Ohio State University have found one
explanation for why older adults tend to be more prejudiced than
young people: they just can't help it. A new study suggests that
as older adults lose their inhibitory ability -- the capacity to
suppress unwanted or irrelevant information -- they find it
difficult to disregard their own stereotypical or prejudicial
thoughts. The result is that older adults are more likely to
think and express prejudicial thoughts, even when they want to
be non-prejudiced and are reminded to ignore stereotypes. "We
know older adults grew up in more prejudiced times, so many
people have just assumed that they didn't change with the times.
But our results suggest that many older people want to change,
they want to be more tolerant, but they have lost a cognitive
ability that would help them be more tolerant," said William von
Hippel, co-author of the study and associate professor of
psychology at Ohio State University. Von Hippel conducted the
study, which appears in