Minding the Store

New research shows why elderly people are more easily swayed by the power of suggestion than are their younger counterparts--making them easy prey for con artists.

In Florida last year, a judge sentenced Tim Day to 10 years in prison for defrauding about 10,000 seniors out of more than $600,000, according to U.S. Department of Justice officials. Day and his compatriots told their victims that they were collecting for police, firefighter, and other charities but kept the money for themselves.

The elderly are prime targets for fraud, warn agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Among the reasons: They are more likely to be trusting, to have money socked away, and to be attracted to potions or products that promise good health and longevity. But a recent study points to another, more biological reason that seniors might succumb easily to scams: Because of the way the mind ages, older folks are more liable to believe that a con artist is telling the truth.

If a contractor comes to collect payment for a job and tells the customer, “You can write me a check for the $5000” instead of the $2500 previously quoted price, an elderly person is about 10 times more likely than a young adult to be swayed by the false figure, according to a recent study by cognitive psychologist Larry Jacoby of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues. And it's not because seniors are more gullible. “The elderly are more likely to falsely remember the price as the quoted one,” Jacoby says.

The researchers came to this conclusion after administering a specially designed memory test to groups of volunteers in their late teens and 20s and others over 60. They told volunteers to memorize pairs of words, such as "knee" and "bone," from a list. Before asking the participants to recall the word pair, the researchers showed them a related, but misleading, single word, such as “bend” instead of “bone,” and told them to remember it for a separate test that would be given later on.

The younger volunteers, as expected, were better at remembering the correct word pair. And on the few occasions they got it wrong, they were quick to admit they were just guessing. By contrast, older folks were more often fooled by the misleading word and came up with the wrong pairing. But more significantly, they claimed that they remembered the misleading word from the original list more than 40% of the time, compared to less than 1% for the younger people. So not only were the older adults error-prone, Jacoby says, they were confident that their memory was intact.

In addition, when the young adults were told that they could pass if they didn’t know an answer, they exercised that option and further improved their scores. But the older adults did not, strengthening the idea that seniors are often unaware when their memory is fuzzy.

The reason that older adults produce such false memories, Jacoby says, is that they are mixing two streams of memory. The ability to recall a specific event--seeing the phrase "knee bone" or hearing a $2500 estimate for home improvement--tends to wane with age. But unlike young adults, older people often don’t realize when they can’t remember specifics. They unknowingly compensate for this lack of information by calling up a memory for something that could have happened--such as having read the phrase "knee bend" or having been told that the repairs would cost $5000. "Instead of saying 'I don’t know,’ [older people] fall back on general knowledge,” says William Hoyer, a cognitive psychologist at Syracuse University in New York. Or they readily accept suggestions that seem plausible to fill in for the specific memory that's gone missing.

“It’s a very important paper for the field,” says Hoyer. “Jacoby has provided a sound basis for this way of looking at memory declines in aging.”

The deficits reflect age-related deterioration in two brain structures. The hippocampus governs recollection, holding specific memories along with their context. This structure tends to become less effective at storing various memorable details as the years pass. But the decision to rely on what is familiar when it isn’t appropriate can be blamed on the frontal lobe, a large section of brain tissue behind the forehead whose function also declines with age. “The frontal lobe is directing what kind of memory we’re using,” says Jacoby.

The elderly's reliance on familiarity could also explain why older people tell someone the same story repeatedly. The anecdote feels familiar, and they don’t remember having told it to that specific person, Jacoby says. Younger people, by contrast, can recollect having already regaled a friend with a particular tale, and that memory stops them from repeating themselves.

Such lapses are not universal, of course. “There is variability among the elderly in terms of recollection and vulnerability to scams,” says Jacoby. That variability depends on biology as well as environmental influences such as level of education and staying mentally and physically active, he adds.

But for those who need them, Jacoby’s group is developing strategies for training older adults to improve their recollection by working harder to remember specifics. In one experiment, Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter and his colleagues minimized age differences in false recollection when they showed older adults a picture to accompany the words they were asked to memorize. “If older adults encode distinctive information"--cues that help them distinguish one particular event from another--says Schacter, “they can rely on it later on." So an elderly person might mentally note to whom she is telling a story or a red post that points to where her car is parked.

To avoid scams, however, seniors shouldn't rely solely on their memory, says Jacoby. Instead, they should get everything in writing. File all written estimates and receipts in an orderly fashion and in an accessible place. And always check records before paying a bill.

Ultimately, seniors should be wary of anybody trying to collect money from them. "One doesn't want to go through life not trusting anybody," says Jacoby. "On the other hand, older adults have reason to be skeptical." Doing so might save them some money--and conceivably, save the FBI some work.

Ingrid Wickelgren is a writer in northern New Jersey who is getting her bills organized now so she doesn’t forget to do it later.