MOSCOW, February 20, Tatyana Pichugina There is more and more evidence that older people are more easily deceived by attackers. In the USA alone, about 28 billion dollars a year are defrauded from elderly people. Why are they so trusting and how to help them — in the material .
Genes of altruism
Numerous experiments have shown that gullibility is genetically embedded in us. This is necessary for the survival of the species; selflessness brings many benefits to both the individual and society. The degree of gullibility varies between 10-20 percent depending on the country. This has been demonstrated by studies with twins in Sweden and the USA.
Not everything, however, is explained by genes. Trustworthiness changes with age; it is higher among old people than among young people. Along with obvious advantages, this makes them more vulnerable. Elderly people are more often deceived, robbed, and exploited. Thus, according to information from the Central Bank, in 2020, among the victims of fraud, the majority of those over 60 are those over 60 — 27%. And this is only in cybercrimes.
How trust influences our decisions
The ability to distinguish reliable people from scammers is critical, but weakens with age, scientists say. In recent years, a lot of work has been devoted to this.
Deciding who to trust and who not is the result of a complex thought process. The first impression, the recommendations of others, and experience are important. Sometimes a glance at a face is enough. However, even here everything consists of many nuances — attractiveness, emotions, age, external similarity. Therefore, mistakes are common.
The facial cues we rely on to initially assess the trustworthiness of strangers are not informative enough and may become outdated over time. We need to update them and add other criteria, for example, attracting experience, looking at behavior during communication. How exactly this happens in different age groups is not entirely clear. It is known that young and old equally assess the degree of reliability of a person based on facial signals. This means that this ability persists with age. However, the older generation tends to attach greater importance to the first external impression. This is especially noticeable when interacting with strangers with questionable backgrounds or behavior, but outwardly decent. There is evidence that over the years it becomes more difficult to recognize emotions and deception in the face.
Scientists study the decision-making process using various games, in particular the Iowa problem. Participants are asked to draw cards from four decks. In the first two, the cards lead to a loss after a few moves, in the other two — to a win. You need to understand which decks are winning and draw cards only from them. A healthy person without brain damage easily solves this problem, but not analytically, but intuitively. In such experiments, it was found that older people are more likely to trust unreliable partners in the game than young people, and in general easily lose their vigilance.
Can old people understand people better? To answer this question, scientists from the University of Florida in the USA used both the classic Iowa game task and its adapted version. Images of faces were placed on the cards as clues. The trustworthy ones were put into good decks, the unreliable ones into bad ones. As expected, all participants, regardless of age, completed the task.
In the next test, good and bad faces were not associated with winning or losing decks. And here the old people were already lagging behind. They needed more time to adequately understand the situation. One explanation is impairment of cognitive abilities, particularly memory. The elderly refused to believe that betting on good faces leads to loss and forgot recent game results.
Malfunction of the sixth sense
Researchers from Australia, analyzingSeveral dozen experiments from around the world came to the conclusion that with age, people tend to perceive more, remember good information and discard negativity. This was called the positivity effect. Perhaps it is associated with a change in motivation: as a person ages, he realizes that there is not much time left and seeks more good emotions.
This is also confirmed by the model of the aging brain: the amygdala reacts to negativity as the anterior insula, which is involved in the “sixth sense” that arises in the event of unforeseen danger. As a result, older adults disproportionately rely on positive information when making decisions. In other words, they are more likely to classify bad people as trustworthy.
All these results were obtained in laboratories, scientists warn, and need to be verified. In particular, it is necessary to collect statistics on those deceived and survey them. The vulnerability of older people is obviously due to the fact that they are less oriented in the digital world. Perhaps the generations that follow them, when they grow old, will not be so trusting. To establish this, it is necessary to launch long-term cohort observations. Now there is only one such thing.
Whether it is possible to make the older generation understand people better is a big question. In science, this direction is still in its infancy. Chinese scientists tried to accustom older people to rely on their feelings when looking at a stranger, and not on his facial features. This method, paradoxical at first glance, gave good results.
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