Bodily awareness could curb scams and fraud against older adults

You click on an email you weren’t expecting from your bank, and something seems off. Your pulse quickens. There’s a twinge in your gut. It doesn’t feel right.

Then you notice the email address is clearly fake, the message riddled with typos. Clearly a phishing attempt, you say to yourself as you delete it and move on, a careful eye on your bank account.

This kind of “gut instinct” may be realer than we thought. Our bodies could be helping us tune into lies and scams, according to new research from University of Florida psychologists that found that older adults who were more attuned to their own heartbeat were better at spotting liars and phishing emails.

“We see that it’s helpful to listen to these inner signals, and we think it’s something that we could train in people to help them detect scams better, but that will take more research,” said Natalie Ebner, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at UF and senior author of the new study.

That would be a big boon, because older adults lose more than $28 billion to financial scams targeting the elderly every year.

To test the role of this gut instinct, researchers recruited more than 100 adults split into two age categories: college-aged adults in their early twenties and an older group with an average age of 69. Each participant was asked to count their own heartbeat without taking their pulse, which tested their attunement to their body.

The researchers published their findings Sept. 19 in The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences.

Each subject then had to try and spot phishing emails taken from real scam attempts. They were also tasked with detecting liars shown in real news footage. Each video showed someone pleading for the return of a missing family member—but some of the speakers were ultimately convicted of murdering the missing person, revealing their past lies.

“So we look at two very different scenarios. One a dry email, and the other an emotionally charged video,” Ebner said. “In both of those contexts, we see the same effect, that older adults benefit from greater bodily awareness in their deception detection.”

In all, older adults who could more accurately detect their own heartbeat were 15% to 20% better at detecting lies and fake emails. Better bodily awareness did not help younger adults boost their deception detection, perhaps because they used more cognitive skills for the task instead.

Ebner collaborated on the study with UF researchers Tian Lin, Ph.D., Didem Pehlivanoglu, Ph.D., and Pedro Valdes-Hernandez, Ph.D., and psychologists at other universities.