People were better at detecting non-COVID misinformation than they were at detecting truthful news, but they performed similarly for COVID news when detecting both real and fake instances. 

University of Delaware

Reasoning is imperative in social decisions, and older adults tend to be good at reasoning in this context. This was hypothesized to help mitigate other areas which older adults struggle in, such as deception detection, acting as a protective measure against misinformation. However, this study found that greater analytical reasoning skills were not associated with an improved fake news, and age group did not have an effect.

The CISDA Model: Reasoning

Pehlivanoglu, D., Lighthall, N. R., Lin, T., Chi, K. J., Polk, R., Perez, E., Cahill, B. S., & Ebner, N. C. (2022). Aging in an “infodemic”: The role of analytical reasoning, affect, and news consumption frequency on news veracity detection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000426

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