Older people often fall prey to con artists, frauds and scammers. According to a MetLife Study of Elder Financial Abuse, older Americans were swindled out of at least $2.9 billion in 2010, up 12 percent from 2008. Is there a specific reason for this misplaced trust? Yes, says a study conducted by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles.
According to the scientists, in older adults, a certain region of the brain called the anterior insula, which is linked to disgust and is important for discerning untrustworthy faces, is less active in older adults. It is this reduced sensitivity to cues related to trust that makes them vulnerable to fraud.
The finding is based on two studies which appear Dec. 3 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the first study, which involved 119 older adults (mean age 68) and 24 younger adults (mean age 23), the participants were made to look at 30 photographs of faces and rate them on how trustworthy and approachable they appeared. The faces were intentionally selected to look trustworthy, neutral or untrustworthy.
When viewing the trustworthy faces and neutral faces, both the younger and older adults reacted very similarly. But when viewing the untrustworthy faces, the younger adults reacted strongly while the older adults missed facial cues that are pretty easily distinguished, and rated even the untrustworthy faces as more trustworthy and more approachable.
In the second study, which involved 23 older adults (mean age 66) and 21 younger adults (mean age 33), the participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans while looking at the faces.
When viewing the untrustworthy faces and rating them, there was activation of the brain's anterior insula in younger adults as revealed in the scans. However, there was very little anterior insula activation in older adults.
Commenting on the findings, Shelley Taylor, senior author of the new research, said, "It's not that younger adults are better at finance or judging whether an investment is good; they're better at discerning whether a person is potentially trustworthy when cues are communicated visually. It leads us to think that older adults have a diminished gut feeling that something is wrong when someone looks untrustworthy."
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May 01, 2026 15:54 ET Central banks dominated the economics news flow this week with almost all major ones announcing their latest policy decisions and many boosted expectations for a rate hike in June. In other news, several countries released the preliminary data for first quarter economic growth. In the U.S., comments by Fed Chair Jerome Powell were also in focus as his term ends this month.