A Case Overview Of The Stereotype Content Model

Case Overview
John Smith, a middle-aged White man, has been arrested and charged with first degree murder for the death of his common-law spouse, Mary Jones. The key piece of evidence against him comes from the eyewitness statement of Mr. Crowe, an older White man who is 67 years old, who strongly claims he saw the defendant commit the crime as he passed by his upstairs bedroom window (allowing him to see into Mr. Smith’s living room next door). Mr. Crowe is known to be a rather loud and overly confident older man. John Smith’s lawyer holds a personal vindication against older people for ruining his childhood and has been preparing to ask Mr. Crowe an abundance of questions. The court and judge have decided to get an expert witness to ensure

The Stereotype Content Model suggests that people perceive others on dimensions of warmth and competence. Along these dimensions, older adults are imagined to be high in warmth but low in competence, eliciting feelings such as pity (Fiske, 2018). For example, older targets may be stereotyped as warm or loving grandparents, stereotyping them as high in warmth (Fiske, 2018). However, aging is associated with memory impairments and changes to the cognitive system, resulting in stereotypes of low competence for older targets (Fiske, 2018; Grady, 2012). These low competence stereotypes amalgamate into changes in verdicts depending on age and context; a study done in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln had participants found that mock jurors’ age stereotypes do not significantly predict changes in their verdicts (Farnum & Wiener, 2016). However, when age is made an apparent demographic, such when the question posed was “because of his age…”, age stereotypes began to show positive correlations with predictions of witness accuracy (Farnum & Wiener, 2016). This was especially true for mock jurors who rated older targets more highly on low-competence stereotypes, such as senile, sad, or lonely - they were more likely to be biased in deciding if the eyewitness evidence was truthful (Farnum & Wiener, 2016). The jurors

It is found that older people, tested in situations of memory, are prone to stereotype threat especially when asked to perform memory tasks (Wong & Gallo, 2019). A study done on older adult memory found that those who experienced stereotype threat completed less of a free recall task, were less accurate with cued-recall, and recalled fewer examples from a list than those in a no-threat condition (Rossi-Arnaud et al., 2018). The study triggered experiences of stereotype threat by reading passages of memory and declining cognitive passages prior to the recall tasks. Older adults are more likely to worry about stereotype threat in high pressure scenarios in cases of memory recollection, such as in legal contexts (Barber, 2020). However, the level at which this effect is held is dependent on the context cues around them (Barber, 2020). For example, if older adults worry about gossip around them, they are more likely to experience high levels of stereotype threat (Barber, 2020; Thomas, Smith, & Mazerolle, 2020). In contrast, they may only experience low levels of stereotype threat when in a courtroom under circumstances where they do not feel that their age has been made apparent (Barber,