Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this might be interesting academically, I think if ageism is a problem that might generically scare candidates, then that too is the ageists fault for creating that culture of policy, and not a candidate's fault for sincerely being worried about something that is actually worth worrying about. We could say something similar about racism. "How much of a factor the fear of racism is, compared to racism itself..."…
The racist wins if he can spoil your other interviews. Let's say you have 4 interviews, the first one has a racist, and it's obvious. Now let's say you get bitter and resentful, and you blow your other 3 interviews, even though those 3 people aren't racist. The racist is happy(if he finds out) because not only did he prevent you from getting his job, he messed with your head and prevented you from getting the attaina…
The racist or ageist "win" if they are not held accountable, with visible punishment, for their racist or ageist actions. They don't "win" through bespoke second order effects of their first order actions.
In terms of what a candidate should do, it's a heuristic. I choose to apply the heuristic of, "be really wary and cautious that self-interested commercial entities have incentives to generally be ageist or racist."
I pay a cost sometimes when that heuristic was suboptimal. But it's worth it to avoid super widespread predatory practices in a bunch of other cases. Worrying about the hyper-optimized policy that accounts for secondary perceptions of my fear of ageism seems like a huge waste, huge premature optimization effort that could be better spent choosing a simple heuristic and focusing on the up-front, obvious, primary ageism or racism issues.
To boot, honestly, if an employer gets some kind of "weird vibe" from me because I ask questions or discuss policies from an anti-ageism point of view, and this leads them to reject me, then probably my heuristic was right, and really there are internal dysfunctions in that company that I am better off avoiding.
Corporations can harm applicants and employees in so many ways that it often really is better to have a default belief that this is what they are trying to do, and take a very risk-averse heuristic to just avoid places that give off even slight signals, like if they treat you like you're weird for taking a proactive, positive stance on it.
If they reject you, you're probably dodging a nasty bullet anyway.