We examined five-year-old-children's age stereotyping using a modified Piagetian conservation task. Children were asked if two lines of objects were the "same" after one line had been made longer (transformed). A conversational account posits that children's answers reflect assumptions about the asker's motivation for the question (Schwarz, 1996).…

Bandura's Social Learning Theory purports that early exposure to this social information may have an impact on children's schema development (e.g., Bandura, 2001), which may influence how children and later adults think about what it means to age and get older (e.g., what it means to be an aging woman in society). By extension, if the…