Pension Tension: Retirement Annuity Fosters Ageism Across Countries and Cultures

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Globally aging populations raise worldwide concerns about how an older population will be valued. Cross-culturally, many espouse that Eastern cultures revere their older adults more than Westerners, due to stronger collectivism and filial piety traditions. In contrast, this paper proposes a resource tension hypothesis, whereby rapid population aging causes pragmatic strain across all modernized societies, fostering ageism. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: Three studies supported this resource tension hypothesis, focusing on the pragmatic role of public pensions—a fundamental resource inherently pitting older versus younger generations—in fostering ageism. Study 1 tested the relationship between nation-level public pension rate and attitudes toward older adults by using World Values Survey and European Social Survey data sets. Study 2 further explored this relationship via priming both the pension-based resource scarcity and the intergenerational competition over the public pension. Study 3 offered an intervention—future-self-thinking via a photo ager—on reducing intergenerational tensions under pension scarcity conditions. RESULTS: Study 1 found a significant link between nation-level public pension rate and negative older adult attitudes across 39,700 World Values Survey, and 29,797 European Social Survey data points. Study 2 further supported the pension-ageism link via experimental methods. Participants who were reminded of the scarcity of pensions and intergenerational competition exhibited more negative attitudes toward older adults. Study 3 confirmed the effect of the future-self intervention on enhancing attitudes toward older adults even despite scarce pension resources. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS: The findings support a resource explanation in driving perceptions of older adults, implicate pensions as a key mechanism driving intergenerational attitudes, and identify future-self thinking as a critical intervention. The present studies open up new research pathways for understanding and accommodating the globally aging population.