Aging online:

Aging in an “infodemic”: The role of analytical reasoning, affect, and news consumption frequency on news veracity detection.

“…However, there is a growing body of work that suggests a disconnect between believing versus sharing fake news (see , for a review). The age-equivalency in news veracity detection we report in the present study supports the notion that young and older adults may not differ in news veracity detection ability; while they may differ in spreading fake news (Grinberg et al, 2019;Guess et al, 2019) or misinformation (e.g., framed as WhatsApp messages in Vijaykumar et al, 2021) as well as in detection of deception more generally (e.g., in emails; Ebner et al, 2022;Spreng et al, 2021, for recent overviews).…”

“…Aligning with predictions from the CISDA model, affective processes have been shown to impact deception detection, though the direction of these effects is still somewhat unclear and varies by valence (Ebner et al, 2020; Forgas & East, 2008; see also Ebner et al, 2022, for a summary). For example, individuals with greater feelings of sadness and distress (dysphoric mood) compared to nondysphoric individuals were better at lie detection (Lane & Depaulo, 1999).…”

“…Going beyond previous work on fake news, our study also found that age effects emerged and interacted with the CISDA -derived components of analytical reasoning, affect, and news consumption frequency when considering chronological age among older adults in our exploratory analysis. This collection of findings indicates that the oldest-old are at risk for failures in fake news detection, but vulnerabilities are context dependent and ameliorated by protective psychological factors (Ebner et al, 2020; see also Ebner et al, 2022).…”

“…However, both have primarily been tested in young adults only (Bago et al, 2020; Pennycook & Rand, 2019) and both lack consideration of affective and experience-based mechanisms to news veracity detection. In addition to analytical reasoning, consideration of these additional mechanisms is particularly warranted in the context of aging (Ebner et al, 2022; Frazier et al, 2019; Spreng et al, 2021), given age-related changes in affect (Gutchess & Samanez-Larkin, 2019; Pehlivanoglu & Verhaeghen, 2019) and experience-based knowledge (Löckenhoff & Carstensen, 2007; Mata et al, 2012).…”

Introduction to the special issue on prosociality in adult development and aging: Advancing theory within a multilevel framework.

“…Moving forward in this field of research it will be beneficial to take a closer look at this “dark side” of increased/too much prosociality in aging. This line of future work should include a thorough investigation of individuals who have experienced exploitation in their everyday life (Ebner et al, 2021; Spreng et al, 2017; see Ebner et al, in press; Spreng et al, in press, for recent summaries). Older adults are often reluctant to report exploitation due to feelings of shame or embarrassment.…”