Changing Masks: a Masking Effect on Young People’s Social Representation on Aging?

The study is focused with the structure of social representations, common sense theories about relevant themes. It aims at investigating how central the ‘wisdom’ element is for young people’s representations on aging and also if the results provided by social representation questionnaires could be under the influence of normative pressures favoring politically correct responses, the so-called masking effect. The experimental design involved a within-subjects independent variable which was called representation interaction context, with two modalities: normal and substitution (with participants answering ‘as a typical young person’). Dependent variables were the scores of ‘calling-into-question’ items that assessed the symbolic value of elements related to aging. The sample was composed by Brazilian undergraduates. Results of paired t-tests indicated that on the substitution condition elements with a negative connotation (such as ‘death’ and ‘isolation’) had higher symbolic value scores, while the main positive element (wisdom)’s score decreased, indicating that there is a strong effect on the answers associated to interaction context manipulation with the substitution technique. Discussion addresses alternative explanations for the findings, dealing with the influence of sociopsychological biases and group identification as well as the identification criteria of social representations. Current Research in Social Psychology (Vol. 13, No. 19) Wachelke & Lins