Although poor deception detection accuracy is thought to be an important risk factor for fraud among older adults, this link has not been explicitly studied. Using a cross-sectional design, older and young adults viewed and made judgments of real, high-stakes truths and lies with financial consequences. Older (vs. young) adults exhibited a greater truth bias when evaluating individuals pleading for help in finding a missing relative, which was associated with greater donations to deceptive pleaders. However, all participants were highly vulnerable to fraud. Future research should consider both risk and protective factors affecting financial fraud across the lifespan.

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Emotional expressions evoke predictable responses from observers; displays of sadness are commonly met with sympathy and help from others. Accordingly, people may be motivated to feign emotions to elicit a desired response. In the absence of suspicion, we predicted that emotional and behavioral responses to genuine (vs. deceptive) expressers would be guided by empirically valid cues of sadness authenticity. Consistent with this hypothesis, untrained observers (total N = 1,300) reported less sympathy and offered less help to deceptive (vs. genuine) expressers of sadness. This effect was replicated using both posed, low-stakes, laboratory-created stimuli, and spontaneous, real, high-stakes emotional appeals to the public. Furthermore, lens models suggest that sympathy reactions were guided by difficult-to-fake facial actions associated with sadness. Results suggest that naive observers use empirically valid cues to deception to coordinate social interactions, providing novel evidence that people are sensitive to subtle cues to deception.

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