People tend to stereotype sexual minorities and Black men as unusually young, an assumption driven by a shared cultural belief that these groups lack traditional values. This overlapping set of perceptions functions to paint certain demographics as inherent threats to the social order. The research was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. In the early 1970s, sociologist Stanley Cohen popularized the term “folk devils” to describe groups targeted by media-driven moral panic. Cohen analyzed how dominant institutions focused on youth subcultures, turning them into symbols of societal decay. Through these portrayals, young people were framed as actively rejecting established norms and threatening the existing social fabric. New York University Abu Dhabi psychology researcher Jaime L. Napier and her colleagues suspected that similar societal forces shape modern stereotypes of adult minority groups. They predicted that other marginalized populations would be stereotyped in age-related ways because of parallel cultural assumptions about their core values. Previous psychological studies have often focused on a single element of identity at a time, looking at race or gender in …