Aging in an “infodemic”: The role of cognition, affect, and experience on news veracity detection during the COVID-19 pandemic (preprint)

ABSTRACT

Increasing misinformation spread, including news about COVID-19, poses a threat to older adults but there is little empirical research on this population within the fake news literature. Embedded in the Changes in Integration for Social Decisions in Aging (CISDA) model, this study examined the role of (i) analytical reasoning; (ii) affect; and (iii) news consumption frequency, and their interplay with (iv) news content, in determining news veracity detection in aging during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were randomly assigned to view COVID or non-COVID news articles, followed by measures of analytical reasoning, affect, and news consumption frequency. Comparable across young and older adults, detection accuracy was higher for fake than real news unrelated to COVID, and non-COVID fake news detection was predicted by individual differences in analytic reasoning. Examination of chronological age effects further revealed that news veracity detection among more elderly older adults depended on interactions between individual CISDA components and news content. Collectively, these findings suggest that age-related vulnerabilities to deceptive news may only be apparent in very old age. Our findings advance understanding of psychological mechanisms in real and fake news evaluation and empirically support CISDA in its application to news veracity detection in aging.