Older adults had reduced accuracy when it came to detecting non-COVID misinformation, especially among people with higher positive affect.

CISDA: Affect, Age, and News Type

The idea that the way people process things are affected by their emotions. Further, older adults are influenced by emotional goals. 

University of Delaware

Key Components of CISDA

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

Aging in an “infodemic”: The role of analytical reasoning, affect, and news consumption frequency on news veracity detection.

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

The CISDA Model: Affect

Our social choices are informed by our memories of relevant situations. Older adults have more experiences, so CISDA posits that older adults have a richer pool of experiences to inform better decisions. 

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