Gender differences in older adults’ everyday cognitive collaboration

Abstract

Collaborative cognition research has demonstrated that social partners can positively impact individuals' thinking and problem-solving performance. Research in adulthood and aging has been less clear about dyadic effects, such as partner gender, on collaborative cognition. The current study examined the objective and subjective experiences of older men and women's collaboration on three everyday problems. Tasks included comprehension of everyday printed materials, a social dilemma task, and an errand-planning task. A sample of 98 older married couples (N = 196) worked both collaboratively and individually with either their spouse (N = 52 dyads) or a stranger of the other gender (N = 46 dyads). Analyses conducted using the actor-partner methodology (e.g., Gonzalez & Griffin, 1997; Kenny, 1996) suggest that men tended to be more influential during dyadic problem solving, particularly on more ambiguous tasks. Subjective appraisals of collaboration also varied between male and female partners, with familiarity of partner playing a large role in expectations of collaboration. Most notably, women assigned to work with an unfamiliar male partner tended to rate their satisfaction with collaborative teamwork less positively. Both self and partner-rated subjective appraisals, particularly expectations of competitiveness, were predictive of collaborative performance.

Dyadic Cognition in Old Age: Paradigms, Findings, and Directions

“…It is interesting to note that even though Margrett and Marsiske (2002) do not find sex differences on planning performance, they do find that men are more influential, i.e., more likely to use their own judgement to influence their own collaborative outcome on the planning task in the collaborative situation.…”

“…Margrett and Marsiske (2002) as well as Berg et al (2003) also used decision making tasks in the studies mentioned above. Another approach to examine decision making in old dyads stems from the wisdom tasks used by .…”

“…Small sample sizes (Berg et al, 2003) and the lack of within-subject studies make comparisons between old and young dyads as well as between collaborative and individual performance difficult. Margrett and Marsiske (2002) and allow with their tasks a comparison between individual and dyadic performance, but not between familiar and unfamiliar and old and young dyads.…”

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“…There may also be costs to collaboration; for example, Margrett and Marsiske (2002) reported that older women experienced collaboration with an unfamiliar male more negatively compared to their male partners. Gould andcolleagues (1991, 1994) found that when collaborating with strangers, time on task could actually be reduced due to the distraction of needing to spend time on getting to know one's partner.…”

“…In truth, in the everyday world, many older individuals conduct many of their daily activities with social partners (e.g., M. Baltes, Wahl, & SchmidFurstoss, 1990); thus, it is meaningful to consider how social partners might help or harm such problem solving (Meegan & Berg, 2002;Strough & Margrett, 2002). There is now consistent evidence that colloboration among older adults may yield performance improvements for older adults on a variety of basic and everyday cognitive tasks, including ''transactive'' memory (Andersson & Rö nnberg, 1995, prose recall (e.g., Dixon & Gould, 1996), inductive reasoning (Margrett & Willis, in press), integrative and everyday tasks (i.e., route planning: Cheng & Strough, 2004) errand planning and comprehension of printed materials (Margrett & Marsiske, 2002) referential tasks (Gould et al, 2002), and social problem solving (Margrett & Marsiske, 2002;Staudinger & Baltes, 1996), as well as more complex everyday tasks, such as coping with prostate cancer and managing diabetes (Palmer et al, 2004;Wiebe et al, 2005). In general, collaboration appears to be beneficial to performance, particularly when it is with a familiar partner, such as a spouse (e.g., Gould, Trevithick, & Dixon, 1991;Gould, Kurzman, & Dixon, 1994;Margrett and Marsiske, 2002; for an exception, see Gould et al, 2002).…”