Michael S North

New York University | NYU · Department of Management and Organizations

Intergenerational conflict appears frequently in American public discourse, often framed as clashes between Millennials and Baby Boomers. Building on intergroup threat theory in an exploratory survey, a preregistered correlational study, and a preregistered intervention (N = 1,714), we find that (a) Millennials and Baby Boomers do express more anim...

We propose that perceptions of professional women change differently than perceptions of men as they age. Drawing inspiration from intersectionality theory, we examine the interaction of age and gender, finding that professional women are seen as more agentic, but also maximally incongruent with the gender-intensified prescription of being communal...

Age stereotypes are beliefs and expectations about individuals based on their age group membership (Posthuma & Campion, 2009). In their focal commentary, Murphy and DeNisi (2021) make a strong case encouraging greater research on the nature and impact of age stereotypes in the workplace. We concur with this general view: a stronger research emphasi...

Ageism is a pan-cultural problem, and correspondingly, increased research attention worldwide has focused on how a person’s age drives prejudice against them. Nevertheless, recent work argues that chronological age alone is a limited predictor of prejudice—particularly in the workplace, where age conflates intertwined elements (e.g., life stage and...

Research on ageism has focused largely on perceptions of and biases targeting older adults, implicitly assuming that age-based stigma increases throughout the life span and that young adults benefit from favorable views relative to their older counterparts. In a series of eight studies (N = 2,323), we provide evidence to the contrary. We theorize t...

How old one feels may be more important than chronological age for some life outcomes-including those in the workplace.

Past research has assumed that social egalitarians reject group-based hierarchies and advocate for equal treatment of all groups. However, contrary to popular belief, we argue that egalitarian advocacy predicts greater likelihood to support "Succession"-based ageism, which prescribes that older adults step aside to free up coveted opportunities (e....

Facing the growing costs of an aging population, authorities of industrialized nations are increasingly pushing workers to retire later in life. In practice, however, older workers face significant barriers due to their age—or rather, due to organizational members’ perception of their age. After reviewing how discrimination against older workers pe...

Common wisdom suggests that older is wiser. Consequently, people rarely give advice to older individuals—even when they are relatively more expert—leading to missed learning opportunities. Across six studies ( N = 3,445), we explore the psychology of advisers when they are younger (reverse advising), the same age (peer advising), or older (traditio...

Although less subjective age focused than other scholarly fields, organizational behavior (OB) faces a familiar challenge: comprehending an aging, increasingly age-diverse workforce, yet finding chronological age alone to be a limited predictor of key work outcomes (e.g., performance). A recent OB framework posits that going beyond chronological ag...

Subjective age research is on the rise, and the term has become an overarching way of describing how individuals idiosyncratically experience the aging process (“How old one feels”). Furthermore, the theory of aged heterogeneity posits that inter-individual variability of similarly aged adults increases over time, suggesting that subjective age may...

Both older individuals and women are proscribed from engaging in power-related behaviors, with women proscribed from behaving agentically and older individuals expected to cede desirable resources through “Succession.” However, little is known about whether these overlapping agency prescriptions equally target men and women across the lifespan. In...

Current research and theory from a range of disciplines on ageism, discussing issues from elder abuse to age discrimination against workers, revised and updated. People commonly use age to categorize and stereotype others–even though those who stereotype the elderly are eventually bound to become elderly themselves. Ageism is found cross-culturally...

Prior work describes specific, prescriptive resource tensions between generations , comprising active Succession, passive Consumption, and symbolic Identity (SCI; North and Fiske). The current paper focuses on how these domains potentially drive intergenerational exclusion in work-related networking and training spheres. Studies 1a–c—each focusing...

Twenty-first century intergroup biases are more automatic, ambivalent, and ambiguous than were old-fashioned biases such as authoritarianism and overt racism, which overtly expressed intergroup hostility. Beyond traditional self-report measures of ethnocentrism and hostile sexism, current measures tap more subtle manifestations of bias. Social domi...

The workforce is rapidly aging. Already at record highs, labor force participation rates of both over-55 and over-65 age segments are expected to nearly double in the immediate future. The current chapter describes how these sweeping demographic changes necessitate both the unprecedented utilization of older workers and intergenerational collaborat...

Prevailing beliefs suggest that Eastern cultures hold older adults in higher esteem than Western cultures do, due to stronger collectivist traditions of filial piety. However, in modern, industrialized societies, the strain presented by dramatic rises in population aging potentially threatens traditional cultural expectations. Addressing these comp...

The workforce is rapidly aging. Older segments of the workforce are not only the fastest growing right now, but are also the only ones projected to grow significantly in coming decades. With workplaces becoming increasingly older and more intergenerational, organizations that act actively to capitalize on the aging workforce stand to gain the most....

Social categories both create and reflect inequality. Macro, overarching forces, and individual, perceiver biases each contribute. First, we review perspectives deriving from classic sociological and prevailing psychological social psychology, including both interpersonal fluidity and cognitive economy. Social psychologists have implicated several...

We introduce a computer vision problem from social cognition, namely, the automated detection of attitudes from a person's spontaneous facial expressions. To illustrate the challenges, we introduce two simple algorithms designed to predict observers' preferences between images (e.g., of celebrities) based on covert videos of the observers' faces. T...

We introduce a novel ageism scale, focusing on prescriptive beliefs concerning potential intergenerational tensions: active, envied resource succession, symbolic identity avoidance, and passive, shared-resource consumption (SIC). Four studies (2,010 total participants) were used to develop the scale. Exploratory factor analysis formed an initial 20...

Perspectives on ageism have focused on descriptive stereotypes concerning what older people allegedly are. By contrast, we introduce prescriptive stereotypes that attempt to control how older people should be: encouraging active Succession of envied resources, preventing passive Consumption of shared resources, and avoidance of symbolic, ingroup id...

Ageism research tends to lump "older people" together as one group, as do policy matters that conceptualize everyone over-65 as "senior." This approach is problematic primarily because it often fails to represent accurately a rapidly growing, diverse, and healthy older population. In light of this, we review the ageism literature, emphasizing the i...

Participants’ faces were covertly recorded while they rated the attractiveness of people, the decorative appeal of paintings, and the cuteness of animals. Ratings employed a continuous scale. The same participants then returned and tried to guess ratings from 3-s videotapes of themselves and other targets. Performance was above chance in all three...

Age is the only social category identifying subgroups that everyone may eventually join. Despite this and despite the well-known growth of the older population, age-based prejudice remains an understudied topic in social psychology. This article systematically reviews the literature on ageism, highlighting extant research on its consequences and th...

The present study investigates whether people can infer the preferences of others from spontaneous facial expressions alone. We utilize a paradigm that unobtrusively records people's natural facial reactions to relatively mundane stimuli while they simultaneously report which ones they find more appealing. Videos were then presented to perceivers w...

This study examined college students' cheating in a controlled laboratory setting in which a peer confederate invited participants to cheat on an academic test. Consistent with past findings, male students cheated more than female students. Moreover, predic-tors of cheating interacted with gender. For men, basing self-worth on competition and havin...