People who consume more news do not perform better when tasked with identifying misinformation. Age group did not affect news consumption or misinformation detection.

News Consumption Frequency and Misinformation Detection

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. 

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

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