Hoaxes, Swindles and Fraud: Imaging the Brain to See Why Older Adults Fall Victim to Scams

According to a 2025 survey by AARP, approximately 95.4 million people make themselves vulnerable to theft by responding to calls, texts or friend requests from people they don't know. Deciding who we can trust versus who is out to scam us is growing increasingly difficult in a world where scams are becoming more convincing and complex. This is especially true for older adults, whose biases in deciding whom to trust make them more likely to have their money or identities stolen by everything from fraudulent tech support to phishing campaigns demanding payment for nonexistent bills.

Cognitive neuroscientist Karolina Lempert, PhD, assistant professor in the Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, shares new insights that help to explain these biases in a study she co-authored that combines game-playing and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Recently published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Dr. Lempert's National Institute on Aging-funded study, "Age-related differences in trust decisions: when memory fails and appearances prevail," reveals that older people are more likely to trust someone who looks generous, rather than by relying on their memory of that person's past behavior.

While Dr. Lempert began work on the collaborative project as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pennsylvania before she joined the Derner faculty in 2022, she noted its strong relationship to the current explorations in her Adelphi Lempert Lab about how memory relates to decision-making.

Who Seems More Trustworthy?

"This particular study group, aged 60 or older, tended not to avoid people who had treated them unfairly-almost giving them the benefit of the doubt," she explained. "They tended to approach people more if they looked more generous, warm or trustworthy."

Dr. Lempert and her co-authors first examined this by engaging participants in a classic dictator game-a simple experimental game used in behavioral economics to study decision-making, where one player (the dictator) is given a sum of money and decides how much to share with a second player. Project participants learned whether an individual shared or kept a $10 stake before deciding whom they should play another round with.

The study's participants did not reliably choose to re-engage with those who had shown themselves to be generous-a finding the study said highlights "age-related differences in the ability to both encode relevant information and adaptively deploy it in the service of social decisions."

"There was no correlation between how generous someone looked with how trustworthy they were," Dr. Lempert reported. "If participants couldn't retrieve their memories of whether or not a player had actually shared money, they would go with their gut based solely on appearance."

Discovering Secrets of Early Memory Impairment

While the brain's hippocampus plays a critical role in memory function, it inevitably tends to deteriorate with age. According to Dr. Lempert, older adults face a greater challenge in new learning because of hippocampal deterioration.

The study group played the dictator game while undergoing MRI scanning, using pre-pandemic photos of people with neutral expressions taken in the University of Pennsylvania lab.

"The brain data was what we expected. Older adults had less hippocampal activation when learning about others' dictator game decisions. Then, when making decisions about playing with others later, they showed less activity in cognitive control regions of the brain," Dr. Lempert noted. Ultimately, these neural activity patterns lead to older participants approaching generous-looking people more often, regardless of previous experience.

Beware of Scammers

"Today's scammers are more sophisticated. Technology advances so fast. And unfamiliarity with it leaves people wondering," Dr. Lempert says.

Those who have been victimized by scammers are often embarrassed or reluctant to report their experiences to friends, family or authorities. Yet Dr. Lempert suggests that the best way to prevent scamming is for past victims-or those suspicious of scams-to share their concerns and experiences with others. "They can communicate with people close to them about what happened, or warn them if they receive a text or email that is likely a hoax. By sending it along to family and friends for advice, they can think before they act."

Looking Ahead

Work in the Lempert Lab follows the same neuroeconomics approach that combines aspects of psychology, economics and neuroscience as that followed in the "Age-related differences in trust decisions" study, with projects that seek to unveil the neural roots of decision-making. Currently, Dr. Lempert is finishing up her National Institute on Aging and National Institutes of Health-funded grant project that explores how perception of the passage of time can shape decision-making. "The initial results are really interesting," she reports.

To learn more about Dr. Lempert's insights and information about differences in decision-making visit "The Ant and the Grasshopper," her Psychology Today blog.