Culture Linked to Increasing Ageism During COVID-19: Evidence From a 10-Billion-Word Corpus Across 20 Countries

OBJECTIVES: Older adults experience higher risks of getting severely ill from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), resulting in widespread narratives of frailty and vulnerability. We test: (a) whether global aging narratives have become more negative from before to during the pandemic (October 2019 to May 2020) across 20 countries; (b) model pandemic (incidence and mortality), and cultural factors associated with the trajectory of aging narratives. METHODS: We leveraged a 10-billion-word online-media corpus, consisting of 28 million newspaper and magazine articles across 20 countries, to identify nine common synonyms of “older adults” and compiled their most frequently used descriptors (collocates) from October 2019 to May 2020—culminating in 11,504 collocates that were rated to create a Cumulative Aging Narrative Score per month. Widely used cultural dimension scores were taken from Hofstede, and pandemic variables, from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. RESULTS: Aging narratives became more negative as the pandemic worsened across 20 countries. Globally, scores were trending neutral from October 2019 to February 2020, and plummeted in March 2020, reflecting COVID-19’s severity. Prepandemic (October 2019), the United Kingdom evidenced the most negative aging narratives; peak pandemic (May 2020), South Africa took on the dubious honor. Across the 8-month period, the Philippines experienced the steepest trend toward negativity in aging narratives. Ageism, during the pandemic, was, ironically, not predicted by COVID-19’s incidence and mortality rates, but by cultural variables: Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Long-term Orientation. DISCUSSION: The strategy to reverse this trajectory lay in the same phenomenon that promoted it: a sustained global campaign—though, it should be culturally nuanced and customized to a country’s context.