Age Differences in Social Schematicity

Summary

A reduced processing resource in older adults is a popular current explanation for age differences in cognition. A reduced resource hypothesis has also been used to explain age differences in social information processing. We have argued that a simple resource reduction interpretation is inadequate to explain many social cognitive phenomena, including causal attributions. We have focused on aspects of social information processing, such as automaticity of access to information held in memory, that must be considered in the context of concurrent processing resources to explain age differences in social reasoning, when they occur. More critically, we have identified a major competitor to a reduced processing resource account: age differences in the content, schematicity, and activation of social knowledge and social belief systems. This account does not depend upon reductions in processing capacity, but instead argues that an individual of any age will not engage in elaborative social reasoning when actors in social contexts violate strongly held beliefs about appropriate social behaviors. According to this view, age differences in social norms and rules regarding appropriate behaviors account for age differences in causal attributions in the type of social vignettes we have examined in our research. We have also provided a brief description of an empirical approach that addresses the difficult issue of how to measure different individuals’ relevant belief systems, in terms of content and schematicity of that content. We believe this approach can help to compare and contrast the processing resource view with a knowledge view of age differences in causal attributions, and perhaps, other kinds of social information processing as well.