Are Old People Scary? A Report from Down Under
I spent several days last week at the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists Annual Conference (SASP), held this year in Manly Australia. SASP brings together social psychologists from Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere in Asia, and, for those readers who have attended SPSP, it feels like a bit like that, only with a lot more Aussie and Kiwi accents, though there are Americans, Brits, Europeans and so on peppered about. I myself gave a talk, drawing on some of the material I’ve discussed in this blog (about robots, trends in psychology, and seahorses). I also talked about siblicide among one of their local creatures, the laughing kookaburra, though I’m told I mispronounced it. I was pleased with the reception of the talk, given that evolutionary psychology generally is about as well received in Australia as it is in the U.S., though there, as elsewhere, there are nuclei of sympathetic researchers, including Bill Von Hippel (Queensland), Joe Forgas (UNSW), and the organizers of the conference, Megan Oaten, Trevor Case, and Julie Fitness (Macquarie).
I had planned to post a couple of items from the conference, but I found that my access to the internet was very limited whereas my access to alcohol was not, which turned out to be a bad combination in terms of blog productivity.
Generally, the main themes of the conference were about as one would expect, with sessions on stereotypes, prejudice, anger, relationships, self-esteem, and social identity. Researchers were generally opposed to the first three of those, and in favor of the latter three. The talks were about as one would find at SPSP, with theories such as the idea that “people are motivated to expand the self,” about which I will say little. I should add that one Alexis Whitton gave an excellent talk on moral disgust, which won the Outstanding Postgraduate award. Generally, the conference encourages presentations by students, which I think is nice.
I will mention one piece of work that I thought was interesting, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. The research follows in the line of work showing that certain kinds of stimuli resist extinction. The general paradigm works like this.
You come into a lab, and someone attaches electrodes to your skin, and shows you a bunch of pictures. They shock you (“uncomfortable, but not painful”) when some of these pictures appear, forming a learned association between the picture and the pain. Then they show these pictures again, but without the shock, a procedure which should cause the association between pain and picture to go away, a process called extinction. This is measured by a technique such as skin conductance, measuring how freaked out you get when you see the picture that’s linked to the shock.
Of interest is the fact that the speed of extinction depends on the picture. Some pictures, such as birds, give rise to fairly quick extinction, while other stimuli, such as spiders, give rise to slow extinction. The association for some stimuli, once learned, is “sticky,” if you will, resisting unlearning. In the social realm, this effect has been observed for other-race faces. Olsson et al. (2005) showed that when you train people up on faces, extinction is slower for targets that are of a different race from the subject than faces that are targets that are of the same race as the subject. Navarrete et al. (2009) showed that this occurs for male target faces but not female target faces.
When extinction is slower, this is explained in the context of Seligman’s (1971) classic notion of “prepared learning.” In the case of race, of course, the mechanism probably isn’t built around race per se, but rather cues that targets are members of some out-group, the cues to which are acquired over the course of development.
Which brings me to the finding reported at the conference. Lipp, Thomason, and Mallon showed data from a study in which the stimuli consisted of either pictures of college age people or pictures of older people (all the same race as subjects, and all male). They find that the older faces resist extinction, just like the other-race faces do, but that the college age faces do not. They conclude that “previous reports of persistent fear to other-race faces reflect on social learning rather than on prepared learning mediated by evolution.”
First, I should say I thought the study and the data were interesting, but I don’t know if there are methodological issues or other difficulties, since this isn’t really my area.
Having said that, it seems to me that their conclusion is a bit odd. It implies that social learning is to be set against learning “mediated by evolution,” but whatever the social learning mechanisms are, they, too, are obviously evolved. So I think the claim here is about the specificity of the putative learning system. If I understood correctly, they seem to want to say that it has something to do (though I’m a bit unclear on the specifics) with the negative stereotypes that attach to old people that explains why the acquired fear conditioning is sticky.
Maybe. It does seem a bit odd that you see the same effect for old men as you do for other-race males. I would be interested to know what people do work in this area make of this finding. For myself, well, as I say, the finding seems interesting, and maybe I need to take another trip to Australia to learn more about it…
References
Lipp, O. V., Thomason, H. M., & Mallan, K. M. (2011). Persistent fear conditioned to other-age social out-group faces. Conference presentation.
Navarrete, C.D., Olsson, A., Ho, A., Mendes, W., Thomsen, L., & Sidanius, J. (2009). Fear extinction to an out-group face: The role of target gender. Psychological Science,20(2): 155-158.
Olsson, A., Ebert, J.P., Banaji, M.R., & Phelps, E.A. (2005). The role of social groups in the persistence of learned fear. Science, 309, 785–787.
Seligman, M. (1971). Phobias and preparedness. Behavior Therapy, 2, 307–321.
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