Experience Is an Asset: The Research on What Gets Better With Age
Most of what gets written about getting older is a list of losses. Slower reflexes. Harder-to-find words. Names that slip away at parties. Some of that is real, and nobody is served by pretending otherwise.
But researchers have also spent decades asking a second question: what holds up, or even improves, as the years go on? The answer turns out to be more interesting than either the gloomy version or the cheerful one. Different abilities rise and fall on very different schedules, and several of the ones that matter most in daily life peak later than most people assume.
Not one curve, but many
For a long time, people talked about "the mind" as if it had a single peak, usually placed somewhere in early adulthood. A 2015 study in Psychological Science by Joshua Hartshorne and Laura Germine challenged that picture.
They combined two sources: standardized IQ and memory test data, and online testing of 48,537 people. Their conclusion, in their own words, was "considerable heterogeneity" in when abilities peak. Some peaked and began to decline around high school graduation. Some plateaued in early adulthood and began declining in the 30s. Others did not peak until the 40s or later.
A few specifics from the paper:
- Processing speed (measured with a timed symbol-matching task) peaked earliest, in the late teens.
- Short-term and working memory peaked later, in the 20s and 30s.
- Reading emotions in faces (a test using photos of only the eye region) peaked later than the memory tasks, with a long, broad plateau of relatively stable performance between about 40 and 60.
- Vocabulary peaked latest of all. In the online sample, the peak came at around 65. In the older standardized test data, it came around 50.
The authors offer a careful guess about why vocabulary peaked later in the newer sample: more adults today work in mentally demanding jobs. That's a hypothesis, not a finding, but it points in an encouraging direction. What you keep using, you tend to keep.
Knowledge versus speed
Psychologists have long drawn a line between two broad kinds of thinking. One is quick, flexible problem-solving with unfamiliar material. The other is the accumulated store of knowledge, words, facts and know-how that comes from years of learning and doing. The first tends to decline earlier. The second tends to hold up much longer.
The Hartshorne and Germine data fit that pattern. The tasks that drew on learned knowledge, such as vocabulary, general information and comprehension, peaked significantly later than nearly every other task they measured.
In practical terms: you may not be as quick on a brand-new puzzle as you were at 25. But you likely have a far larger library to draw from, and many real problems are not brand-new puzzles. They look a great deal like something you have seen before.
Judgment about people
The most striking finding may be about social reasoning. In a 2010 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Igor Grossmann and colleagues at the University of Michigan gave a community sample of adults short stories about conflicts, some between groups and some between individuals, and asked them to predict how each would unfold.
Trained coders scored the answers for what the researchers called higher-order reasoning: recognizing multiple perspectives, allowing for compromise, and acknowledging the limits of one's own knowledge. Compared with young and middle-aged participants, older participants made more use of these reasoning patterns. The authors summarized it plainly: social reasoning improved with age despite a decline in fluid intelligence.
It's one study, with its own limits. But it matches something many people notice in their own lives. The urge to be right gives way, slowly, to a better question: what is actually going on here, and what would help?
Emotional steadiness
There's also research on how life feels from the inside. Laura Carstensen and colleagues at Stanford followed a sample of adults across roughly a decade. Several times a day for a week, participants were prompted to report their emotions. The researchers repeated that week of sampling five and then ten years later.
Their 2011 paper in Psychology and Aging found that aging was associated with more positive overall emotional well-being, greater emotional stability, and more emotional complexity, meaning positive and negative feelings more often showed up together. Those findings held after the researchers accounted for personality, verbal fluency, physical health and demographic factors.
That doesn't mean everyone gets happier with age, or that hard years don't come. It means that, on average, in this sample, emotional life tended to grow steadier rather than more fragile.
What the research doesn't say
It's worth being honest about the limits:
- Averages aren't individuals. Every one of these findings describes groups. Your own path depends on health, habits, circumstances and plenty of luck.
- Some declines are real. The same studies that show late peaks also show early ones. Processing speed and working memory do tend to fall over adulthood.
- Comparisons across ages are tricky. People born decades apart grew up with different schooling, jobs and technology. Researchers work hard to account for that, but it's never perfect.
The fair summary isn't "everything gets better." It's that aging isn't a single slope downhill. Some things fall, some hold, and some climb.
Putting experience to work
If knowledge, perspective and emotional steadiness tend to hold up or grow, the useful question is how to put them to work.
- Lean on pattern recognition, and check it. When something looks familiar, say so, then ask what's different this time. Experience is most valuable when it's paired with curiosity.
- Take the roles that need judgment. Mentoring, mediating, advising and reviewing all reward the reasoning Grossmann's team measured: weighing several views and admitting what you don't know.
- Keep using what you know. Read, write, teach and explain. Keep your vocabulary and knowledge in daily use rather than on a shelf.
- Let speed go where it doesn't matter. Give yourself time on unfamiliar tasks. Slower and right usually beats fast and wrong.
Experience isn't a consolation prize for lost speed. In a number of measurable ways, it's an asset in its own right. For more on putting it to use, see Your Track Record Is a Better Forecaster Than Your Plan and Chance Favors Only the Prepared Mind.
Sources
- Hartshorne, J. K., & Germine, L. T. (2015). When does cognitive functioning peak? The asynchronous rise and fall of different cognitive abilities across the life span. Psychological Science, 26(4), 433–443. DOI · Full text (PMC)
- Grossmann, I., Na, J., Varnum, M. E. W., Park, D. C., Kitayama, S., & Nisbett, R. E. (2010). Reasoning about social conflicts improves into old age. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(16), 7246–7250. DOI · Full text (PMC)
- Carstensen, L. L., Turan, B., Scheibe, S., Ram, N., Ersner-Hershfield, H., Samanez-Larkin, G. R., Brooks, K. P., & Nesselroade, J. R. (2011). Emotional experience improves with age: Evidence based on over 10 years of experience sampling. Psychology and Aging, 26(1), 21–33. DOI · Full text (PMC)
- Horn, J. L., & Cattell, R. B. (1967). Age differences in fluid and crystallized intelligence. Acta Psychologica, 26, 107–129. DOI