My friend Al called me a few weeks ago. He said he wanted to tell me about something. He spoke with a self-deprecatory chuckle in his voice. The way Al told me the story on the phone, he’d been at a public meeting at the library, seated at a table with three chairs.
He was sitting in the chair on the left, a woman was in the right chair at the other end of the table and the middle chair was empty. He nodded a friendly greeting to that woman and, shortly thereafter, he said hello to another woman as she sat in the middle chair, next to him. He told me that he’d guessed the woman sitting down next to him was about 85 years old.
After the meeting presentations concluded, there was time for small-group discussions at each table. The woman next to Al went out to the bathroom, and he started talking with the other woman at the table, who countered, “Let’s wait until your wife gets back from the bathroom.”
On the phone, Al laughed sheepishly. He admitted to being shocked that the woman at the end of the table could even think he was married to their table mate. He confided that his first thought was, “Do I really look that old?” At the time, he felt embarrassed. And in that moment on the phone with me, he was embarrassed but not ashamed. He had realized his unconscious ageist bias quickly. When he got home he told his wife all about it. He wasn’t proud of it. After he and I talked about it some more, I called him an ageist A-hole, we laughed, and hung up.
I was glad he’d called me, but the story isn’t over. A week or so later we had lunch together, during which we had our usual wide-ranging conversation, and of course we revisited our previous phone call. We talked about judging other people based on assumptions, the nature of relationships, and how one person’s appearance can reflect something about the other person. And during that lunch conversation, Al realized something. It was an “a-ha” moment for him.
In our first phone conversation, he told me that, when he first saw the woman sitting down next to him, he’d thought she was about 85. But as he re-told the story at lunch, Al realized that he had not consciously thought about her age until she’d been referred to as his wife.
In other words, his first impression of her age had been totally unconscious. Al’s ageist assumptions about, and judgments of, the woman sitting next to him were totally unconscious until their “relationship” was mentioned. He had judged her appearance instantly, but not consciously. That judgment didn’t rise to the level of consciousness until he felt personally insulted. Al was amazed by this realization.
This is a clear and fascinating example of how deep and common our unconscious bias runs. Because of a variety of reasons, including socialization, cognitive development, cultural influences, fear and stereotyping, we learn at early ages to “other” other people. We do it without thinking and even without realizing it. And the effects of this othering differ, given power and privilege and resources.
Al and I both learned something from his a-ha moment.
