022 Chapter 2 Background Descriptive stereotypes often involve assessments of age groups along the dimensions of warmth and competence, portraying older adults as warm but incompetent.29 This perception of older people as warm but less capable than people of other ages is well-documented in the literature about ageism.30 While high warmth perceptions seem positive, they can lead to overprotective or overaccommodative treatment, and undermine older adults’ autonomy, particularly when coupled with low competence perceptions.31 This type of benevolent or paternalistic ageism differs from hostile ageism, which involves more explicitly aggressive attitudes towards older adults.32 Older people’s experiences of benevolent ageism include condescending language,33 receiving unwanted help,34 and being treated as though they’re incompetent.35 2.2 Drivers of ageism Unlike other social ‘isms’ such as racism and sexism, ageism against older people is something that we may all experience if we live long enough. This is why ageism is sometimes referred to by scholars as ‘a prejudice against our future self.’36 Micro-level ageism – ageism that occurs at the individual level – is theorised to stem from fear and lack of understanding about ageing and older age.37 In this view, ageing is associated with death, and older adults serve as a direct reminder of our inevitable mortality. Younger age groups cast older adults as the ‘other’ as a way of distancing themselves from older adults, who remind them of decline and death.38 This incorporates not only a decline of the physical self, but also of the social self. Ageism is also thought to develop over the life course from continuing exposure to negative stereotypes of old age, which eventually leads to such views being accepted by people, often implicitly. When ageist stereotypes and norms become directed inward towards oneself, this is described as ‘internalised ageism’.39 In contemporary societies, anti-ageing discourses, such as the medicalisation of older age40 and glorification of youth,41 often underpin ageist attitudes against older adults. Figure 1. Drivers of ageism Medicalisation of old age (Ng et al., 2015, in Wyman, Shiovitz-Ezra, & Bengel, 2018) Glorification of youth (Grefe, 2011, in The Benevolent Society, 2017) The medicalisation of older age refers to the ‘increased focus on the medical aspects of being old – to the exclusion of other dimensions of older age’,42 while society’s glorification of youth privileges youth over age43 and attributes characteristics, such as physical beauty and strength, to being young.44 Such narratives perpetuate negative stereotyping of ageing as undesirable and a period of decline and ill health, and contribute to the ageist rhetoric that portrays older adults as vulnerable and a burden to society.