Changes in Self-Perceptions Across the Life Span

In doing some office cleaning this week I came across a study, “Representations of Self Across the Life Span” that was reported out 11 years ago in Psychology and Aging. The study examined differences in how people of varying ages perceive the self.

Sounds like a pretty heady topic for a marketing blog. However, it has great salience today when people designing marketing campaigns and messages are often decades younger than a core market they have in their sights.

The study’s authors wrote, “… in contrast to development in childhood and adolescence, which is characterized by an outward orientation and the acquisition of cultural norms and standards, maturation during adulthood may be more adequately characterized by an inward orientation. In that inward turn, the adult may become more self-reflective and more attuned to historical and emotional processes.”

So what does that say? It says that the young see themselves (the self) as a part of and an extension of specific social contexts. This particularly holds true among age peers. While it is common for the young to speak of themselves as individuals, they in fact are typically more group-minded than self-minded.

I’ve raised 6 teenagers. At one time or another I’ve said to each of them something like, “You’re not going out looking like that, are you?” The usual response is, “Dad, I’m an individual.” Then, they would leave the house to join up with a gaggle of other individuals their own age, all looking more or less alike.

In contrast to how the young see the self, the self-perceptions of older adults tend to reflect a substantially more independent light.

Moving these thoughts into the realm of cognition – who we process information – the authors wrote, “The thinking of youths remains relatively static and is based on dualistic, either-or thinking in which reality is predicated into such categories as self versus other, right versus wrong, reason versus emotions, and so forth. In contrast, adults are better able to integrate such oppositions and to think in terms of dynamic contrasts, contextual differentiation, emotional and contextual embeddedness and patterned change rather than static categories.”

Sorry. That’s the way most mind researchers write. But what the authors mean can be quite simply stated: Perceptions of self and the world about them tend to be independent of context, while older people’s perceptions of self and the world about them tend to be strongly influenced by contextual circumstances.

The static perceptions of the young impart to them a sense of power, a confidence that they can control and bend circumstances in their favor. In contrast, older people tend to hold a more realistic view of the limits of their personal powers. They understand the wisdom of Reinhold Neibuhr’s "Serenity Prayer":

GOD, grant me the serenity

to accept the things

I cannot change,

Courage to change the

things I can, and the

wisdom to know the difference.

Given the common belief that we become more rigid with age, it is hugely ironic that the young self is less adaptive than the older self. This has been born out by studies showing that children and older people tend to survive major natural disasters with less adverse emotional impact than adolescents and young adults suffer.

Every marketer knows that he or she must connect with people’s minds to be successful. Knowing that how the mind manages self-perceptions at various junctures along the life span is a critical piece of consumer intelligence the marketer should understand. I’ll continue this discussion in the next post.

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Kare Anderson]

Benedict Carey discusses a complementary myth re aging in his July 18, 2006 article in The New York Times entitled A ‘Senior Moment’ or a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?"

Here it is

I really enjoyed this post, thinking of myself and of my parents.

[Kare Anderson]

Also, I'd love your take on the big launch aand mix of services that Jeff offers with EONS.

[[email protected]]

I read somewhere that the young think about about the things they are doing, and when older they think about why they are doing them.