Aging Online: Determinants of Susceptibility to Deception in Later Life

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Losses due to elder fraud have reached epidemic proportions. Major contributors to this problem include the proliferation of misinformation campaigns and scams that target our rapidly expanding older population and an increasingly digitally connected world that shifts fraud into the online realm, forcing the aging decision maker to face novel complexities and ambiguities as they navigate cyberspace. Age-related changes occur in a wide spectrum of neurocognitive capacities, altering decision-making ability, potentially leaving older adults particularly vulnerable to false information and deception. In this work, we adopt an ecologically valid behavior-based approach to uncover age-related vulnerabilities in deception detection in the real world, and we use controlled in-lab experiments to determine mechanisms both in the brain and in behavior that underlie deception detection deficits in aging. We find that vulnerability to deception occurs primarily among the oldest old and is linked to socioemotional as well as neurocognitive changes with age. Results have potential to inform the effective design of tailored intervention to reduce victimization among older adults.

This lecture is part of the IHMC Evening Lecture series.