Prescriptive Views of Aging: Disengagement, Activation, Wisdom, and Dignity as Normative Expectations for Older People

This chapter focuses on prescriptive views of aging, which reflect expectations about how older adults should be and behave. We identify four prescriptive views of aging: Disengagement (making way for young people, using resources moderately, not trying to appear young), activation (staying fit and healthy, maintaining an active and productive lifestyle), wisdom (knowing what is important in life, transcending a personal and self-focused perspective on life), and dignity (leading a dignified life, being respected, and valued). Further, we present two studies in which we investigated our proposed model of prescriptive views of aging. In the first study, we showed that endorsement of disengagement and activation increases with age, reflecting an internalization of those age-based prescriptions. Although these two prescriptive views seem to make opposite claims on older people, we found a positive correlation between them, indicating that both disengagement and activation tapped into the overarching social expectation that older adults should not become a burden to others or to society. In the second study, we found evidence that young people implicitly endorse all four prescriptive views of aging. Prescriptive views of wisdom and dignity specify a meaningful identity for older people and provide guidelines for living well in old age. Alternatively, prescriptive views of disengagement and activation are more ambiguous in that individuals and societies may misuse them for social control functions that aim at justifying maltreatment and exclusion of older people based on the assumption that life becomes less worth living in old age.