Conceptions of Chronological Age as a Function of Chronological Age
I t is commonly believed that a person's conception of how "old" a particular chronological age appears to be is related to that person's own chronological age. Thus a.6-yr.-old may consider 20 "old," while a 50-yr.-old may consider it "young." The present study was designed as a crude preliminary attempt to see whether this relation does indeed hold. A questionnaire consisting of six questions, like "What is the oldest a person can be, and still be 'very young'?," "What ages limit the range, 'neither old nor young'?," ecc., was administered to a group of 19 Ss, haphazardly selected from an academic population. Ss' ages ranged from 26 to 73, with a mean of 38.2 and an SD of 13.0. The sum of all the ages given in answer to the six questions was correlated with S's own chronological age, with the expectation that older Ss would yield a higher total, the latter serving as a rough index of S's conception of "how old is old." The r obtained was +.54, significant at about the .02 level; the rank-difference correlation ( r h o ) , however, was only +.25. That the former was so much higher than the latter was probably due in past to the fact that the two oldest Ss, in their seventies, gave very high rotals; the next oldest Ss were in their forties, and gave substantially lower totals. A replication was undertaken three years later, primarily under the impetus of a very recent study by Kogan (1960), who reported that when Ss are asked to judge the chronological age of photographed stimulus persons, higher age estimates tended to be made by older Ss. Ten Ss, aged 19 to 36, with a mean of 27.6 and an SD of 5.4, were selected from the same population. The correlation coefficients obtained this time were T = + .35 and rho = + .36, which are not significantly different from zero with this small an N, but clearly in the same direction as before. That the replication r was smaller than the initial one is probably due in part to the younger mean age of the replication Ss, .and largely to the restricted age range of this sample as compared with the first (the respective ranges were 26 to 73 and 19 to 36; the SDs being 13.0 and 5.4, respectively). Incidentally, it may be interesting to note that the total of one S who was common to both samples did increase from the first to the second administration. These findings lend modest support to the hypothesis that conceptions of chronological age do indeed appear to change with chronological age.