Examining nostalgia’s potential to increase solidarity-based protest against ageism: the case of “age demands action”

Abstract

International movement slogans such as “age demands action” have been used to mobilize the general public against ageism. This chapter asks why people might be willing to engage in such solidarity-based protest. Although little is known about this, theoretically specific ingroup-oriented motivations for social protest might apply (e.g., politicized identity), but also more other-oriented motivations (i.e., toward the elderly) might uniquely apply. We review a series of experiments designed to examine whether inducing elderly related nostalgia increases individuals’ solidarity-based protest intentions against ageism. Results showed that experimentally induced nostalgia did neither increase such intentions, nor the ingroup-oriented motivations. Intriguingly, our findings did show an increased perception of the past that one wants to see reinstated in the future (i.e., a goal template). We discuss the implications of these findings and what they imply for future research and the practice of social protest against ageism.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Constantine Sedikides: orcid.org/0000-0003-4036-889X

ORCID for Tim Wildschut: orcid.org/0000-0002-6499-5487

Catalogue record

Export record

Altmetrics