Older people rely more on confidence in decision-making. This could expose them to scams

Every year, seniors lose more than $28 billion to financial scams targeting seniors. Nearly three-quarters of this money is stolen by people the elderly person knows, people they trust.

According to new research, this vulnerability may be due in part to the fact that older adults have a harder time overcoming their first impressions of people’s trustworthiness when that trust is violated, potentially making them more vulnerable to deception and scams against the elderly.

Researchers say older adults should be wary of their first impressions. Instead, they should focus on whether someone is acting in a way that actually earns their trust or is instead harming them.

“We sometimes make these decisions about reliability in a split second, and that’s an unreliable way to make good long-term decisions,” said Marilyn Horta, Ph.D., a research scientist at the University of Florida and first author of the new study. “All of us, especially older adults, really need to pay attention to how a person behaves rather than our initial perceptions of whether they seem trustworthy or not.”

Horta, UF psychology professor Natalie Ebner, Ph.D., and colleagues published their findings in January in the journal Scientific reports.

The new study on the psychology of trust and decision-making was based on a simple game of chance in which people must choose from a deck of cards that can gain or lose points with each card draw. The more points they get, the more money they can earn. But the deck is stacked. Some will lure you in with big wins followed by even bigger losses, while winning games offer small but more predictable wins.

These presentations were paired with images of faces, some of which were deemed trustworthy and others considered untrustworthy.

The majority of adults, young and old, initially chose to choose cards represented by trustworthy faces. But when they started losing with supposedly reliable cards, the young adults learned much more quickly and tried switching to another deck of cards in hopes of stemming their losses.

It took the older adults most of the game before they started performing well, as they seemed to favor their first impressions of confidence, which masked the fact that the cards were bad. The youngest group averaged an age in the early 20s, while the oldest cohort averaged between 70 and 75 years old.

“Often, fraud occurs through family members. If family members begin to become untrustworthy, older adults may not realize this change in behavior as well,” Ebner said. “They’re not really adapting to the new situation.”

“One of the advantages we have in old age is the accumulation of life experiences. But there can be situations where relying on previous experiences pushes us in the wrong direction and makes us take the wrong decision,” she added. “We must remain vigilant even if we think we know who we can trust.”