So Many Questions

When people over a specific age are recruited for a study about “Aging and Memory Loss,” aren’t they being primed to believe, right from the start, that these two things definitively go together?

Isn’t that called “stereotype activation”? And isn’t the message, We’re expecting your test results to show loss?

And haven’t we learned that stereotype activation tends to skew the results?

I’d love to see a side-by-side study where some subjects are recruited for research on “memory loss” and others for a study on “retention”—or even “improvement.”

Wonder what would happen there?

(P.S.: Have you seen one?)

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