A new study sheds light on why older adults tend to fall for financial scams — they depend more on trust when making choices, according to a report published last month in Scientific Reports.
Older adults should be cautious when interpreting their first impressions and focus more on the way a person acts instead of if they appear trustworthy, the team said.
“We make these decisions about trustworthiness in a split second sometimes, and that is an unreliable way to make good decisions in the long term,” Marilyn Horta, PhD, a researcher at University of Florida research scientist and first author of the new study, said in a statement. “All of us, especially older adults, we need to really pay attention to how a person behaves rather than our initial perceptions of whether they look trustworthy or not.”
As part of the study, the team looked at the impact of facial impressions by age. Data came from 143 younger people with an average age in their early 20s and 129 older adults between 70 and 75. All of them were from the UK.
The game they used is known as a social-based version of the Iowa Gambling Task. It measures a person’s response to making decisions that involve risks and rewards. People have to draw cards from decks with varying rewards and punishments to maximize points. The cards showed people with varying facial expressions on them. The person had to judge what to do based on the face.
Most younger and older adults initially picked cards that showed trustworthy faces when they had to make gambles based on the faces. As the game went on, younger adults were much quicker to learn that they couldn’t trust some faces. Older adults didn’t start to do better at picking trustworthy faces until later on in the game.
“Together these findings suggest that differences between younger and older adults in experience-dependent decision-making are magnified in social contexts that involve a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing,’ which may reflect age-related difficulties in integrating incongruent information,” the authors wrote.
“Often fraud happens through family members. If family members start acting untrustworthy, older adults are potentially not picking up on that change in behavior as well,” Natalie Ebner, PhD, another researcher involved in the study, said. “They’re not adjusting to the new situation as much.”
“One advantage we have in older age is the accumulation of life experience. But there might be situations where relying on previous experiences pushes us in the wrong direction, and we make the wrong decision,” she added. “We have to stay aware even if we think we know who we can trust.”
Each year, older adults lose more than $28 billion to financial scams that target their age group. About three-quarters of that money is stolen by people the individual knows, the team said.
