Reuben Ng: Researcher on Portrayals of Older Adults in Culture
Scientist studies stereotypes about aging in society and on social media platforms
Glammas, fitness junkies and flirts — TikTok is surprisingly full of older adults who are combating stereotypes about aging, and researcher Reuben Ng is studying them as part of his groundbreaking work in culture and aging.
A behavioral and data scientist who has trained at prestigious institutions including Oxford and Yale, Ng is an assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore and lead scientist at the Lloyd's Register Foundation Institute for Public Policy and Understanding of Risk. He is an expert on ageism, social gerontology and quantitative social science and is one of eight Next Avenue 2025 Advocates for Aging.
"Ageism is a global health crisis where older adults are viewed as a burden rather than a resource," Ng has written. As part of a fellowship, he sought "creative strategies and policy solutions to envision a world where older adults are a productive resource to tap on, rather than a burden to be managed. Interacting with experts and top policy thinkers in the U.S. has energized me to seek global policy solutions as the world is rapidly ageing toward 2 billion seniors by 2050."
Ng, 43, was nominated for the Advocates in Aging award by Becca Levy, a 2022 honoree. As Levy explains, "A central focus of Ng's work is the historical portrayal of aging and the transformation of age stereotypes over time."
Cultural Studies
In particular, she cites Ng's recent study of older TikTok influencers. As part of that study, Ng and other researchers examined 1,382 videos posted by TikTok users who self-identified as 60 or older with more than 100,000 followers. Combined, these videos had been viewed more than 3.5 billion times. Ng found that 71% of these videos — including those from accounts such as grandadjoe1933, who now has more than 8.4 million followers talking about food and dolly_broadway who entertains her 2.3 million followers with dance moves — were used to defy age stereotypes. The TikTok stars included glamorous grandmas (known as glammas), older health and fitness influencers and relationship and romance advice-givers with decades of experience on flirting and dating.
Based on Ng's earlier research findings, the TikTok study was a way to see if social media influencers can change negative views of aging. "Understanding the phenomena that stereotypes of older adults have really become negative over the last 200 years, the question was, 'Can we do something about it, can we reverse that?'" Ng noticed that several advocates for aging weren't older people themselves, so finding older role models who also had large followings and positive content provided one solution.
"Ageism is a global health crisis where older adults are viewed as a burden rather than a resource."
Levy explains, "Ng's research found that older TikTok users are using the platform as a tool to combat ageism, offering a fresh perspective on how social media can be leveraged to promote positive portrayals of aging. This study … received widespread media attention, including coverage by The Guardian."
Ng is unpretentious in his many accomplishments. While he is currently at the National University of Singapore, he also has studied at Oxford and Yale, and spent 16 years in government, including working in Singapore's prime minister's office contributing to Singapore's Smart Nation strategies. In consulting, he co-built an advanced analytics practice and also helped implement complex analytics functions. The first Singaporean and Oxonian to win the International Fulbright Science and Technology Award, he also is the first person from Asia to receive the Harkness Fellowship, which is considered a "reverse Rhodes" for innovators in health policy. Additionally, he has been ranked in the top 2% of scientists globally by Stanford since 2022.
Landmark Study
"A central focus of Ng's work is the historical portrayal of aging and the transformation of age stereotypes over time. His 2015 study, which analyzed how age-related stereotypes have evolved over the past 200 years, has become a landmark in the field," Levy explains. That study was groundbreaking, yielding more than 300 citations and featured in many major media outlets. It also was included in the World Health Organization's 2021 Global Report on Ageism.
Ng's collaborative research put a price tag directly on those negative stereotypes: "People who think negatively about aging actually live shorter — about eight years shorter — than those who think positively," he says. "It's quite shocking, actually, the implications of negative thinking on one's health and also even on the health care system …. If you look at the difference between thinking positively about aging and negatively about aging, and you look at the health implications of those who thought negatively about aging and added up the entire health care burden, it added about $63 billion U.S. dollars per year."
"People who think negatively about aging actually live shorter — about eight years shorter — than those who think positively."
Along with exploring historical portrayals of aging, Ng's research delves into contemporary representations of older adults in media, culture and society. He has employed big data analytics to examine the depictions of older adults across several platforms, including X, TikTok, Quora and Reddit, along with traditional media outlets such as magazines, music, film and nursery rhymes. "His work uncovers the pervasive nature of ageism and offers new insights into how age stereotypes manifest in today's digital and cultural landscape," Levy explains.
"His findings have had a profound impact not only in the academic realm, but also in real-world applications, such as legal cases," Levy says. "For example, Ng's work was cited in a case (no. 20-1956) concerning fair housing and age discrimination in Maryland's district courts, demonstrating the practical implications of his research in advancing legal protections for older adults."
With a background in linguistics, Ng chose to look at linguistic databases but first had to develop new techniques to examine the data sets of portrayals of adults across a number of categories, including family roles (grandparents or parents for example) and professional roles (well-respected professions such as doctors and lawyers or military members).
"We did an entire 200-year analysis from 1810 all the way to 2010, looking at four genres — newspapers, magazines, fiction and nonfiction books. … We found from 1810 all the way to 1880, the narratives of all adults were pretty positive. They referred to them as 'heroes,' they referred to them as 'romantics,' but somehow in 1880, it became neutral and from 1880 all the way to 2010, it became heartbreakingly negative in a linear fashion. That means the sort of ageist stereotyping seems to have been systematic over the last few decades."
"I think people should get a balanced view of aging and not think of it as only a burden — it actually could be a blessing, too, because it's unprecedented that we can actually live this long."
"I tried to understand what was driving this change," he says. "I realized in the last six or seven decades, every time we talked about aging and older adults, it was always about the medical conditions like dementia or Alzheimer's or things like that. It was the medicalization of aging that was really driving the negative portrayals of all adults."
As a result, the researchers met with journalists to explain the findings and implored them to balance the negative coverage of aging with stories of resiliency and positive examples of aging. "I think people should get a balanced view of aging and not think of it as only a burden — it actually could be a blessing, too, because it's unprecedented that we can actually live this long," Ng says.
These days, Ng continues research and recently turned his focus to the impact of scams on both older adults and young people. He has found a surprising connection at least in Singapore of grandparents turning to their grandchildren to avoid getting taken but those grandchildren are in turn being duped. "The numbers are staggering," Ng says. In Singapore alone, citizens lost more than $1 billion in U.S. dollars last year.
"When I interviewed the adults about what happened, [they explained] there's this drive to be a smart city, so they want to get into mobile banking, but they are not doing it themselves. They're asking their grandkids to do it for them, and those who are being scammed on their behalf," Ng says. "We used to have interventions for young people separately from the adults, but now my thinking has changed and the scam awareness programs are targeted at intergenerational groups." Ng is studying not only the financial impacts of scammers but also the emotional trauma they inflict — the sense of shame and reputational harm. "We need to add in the health care costs such as therapy" to the tally, Ng says.
As the portrayals and stereotypes of aging adults keep evolving — positive and negative — Ng will continue to find innovative ways to study them.
