Changing ageist mindsets - An experimental study on the effects of intervention methods on ageist hate speech...

Globally, one in two people discriminates against older adults. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated this issue, as evidenced by the increase in ageist hate speech in social media, highlighting the urgent need to combat ageism also in digital spaces. To identify effective online interventions against ageism and hate speech, this study compares three intervention methods: 1) exposure to counter-stereotypical traits, 2) perspective taking, and 3) implementation intention, focusing on their differences in targeting explicit or implicit ageist biases. In an online experiment with a one factor between-subjects design, participants (N = 184) performed one of the three intervention tasks or a control task, followed by assessments of implicit and explicit ageism. Implicit ageism was measured using an Implicit Association Test (IAT; N = 174), which tested the association of old and young faces with age-related hate speech and friendly comments. The study also examined how aging anxiety as a moderator and other potential influencing factors, such as contact with older adults, affected the effectiveness of these interventions. The results show that perspective taking was the only intervention that significantly reduced explicit stereotypes, whereas none of the brief interventions shifted implicit ageism. Aging anxiety did not moderate the effectiveness of the interventions, but it did predict explicit ageism. In summary, this study delineates the conditions under which scalable, brief interventions prove effective within gerontological contexts, while indicating that implicit bias may require more sustained or repeated efforts.