Older and wiser: age differences in susceptibility to investment fraud: the protective role of emotional intelligence

ABSTRACT

There have been inconsistent results regarding whether older adults are more vulnerable to fraud than younger adults. The two main goals of this study were to investigate the claim that there is an age-related vulnerability to fraud and to examine whether emotional intelligence (EI) may be associated with fraud susceptibility. Participants (N = 281; 18–82 years; M = 53.4) were recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and completed measures of EI, decision-making, and scam susceptibility. Participants who scored higher on “ability” EI were less susceptible to scams. The “younger” group (M = 2.50, SD = 1.06) was more susceptible to scams than the “older” group, p <.001, d = 0.56, while the “older” group (M = 4.64, SD = 1.52) reported the scams as being more risky than the “younger” group, p =.002, d = 0.37. “Older” participants were more sensitive to risk, less susceptible to persuasion, and had higher than average emotional understanding. Emotional understanding was found to be a partial mediator for age-related differences in scam susceptibility and susceptibility to persuasion.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional intelligence
• decision-making
• susceptibility to persuasion

Supplementary material

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Notes

1. With 134 participants in one group and 147 participants in the other group, a two-tailed t-test with alpha = 0.05 attained power of 80% for a small effect size (d = 0.34). (G*Power: Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007).

2. A similar analysis including education as a covariate produced comparable results.

3. Education was not a significant predictor of scam susceptibility, r(279) =.04, p =.552. A similar analysis controlling for education produced comparable results.