Adults aged 55 and older are significantly more likely to share political misinformation than younger social media users. And it's not because they're unable to discern fake news from real news, according to new University of Colorado Boulder research.
The study of nearly 2,500 adults across the United States and Brazil found that the older people get, the more partisan they become — and that partisanship can muddy their judgment.
"We found that older people are more likely to believe as true and to share information that aligns with their party, whether that information is true or not," said senior author Leaf Van Boven, professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU Boulder.
The study was a collaboration with Guilherme Ramos, assistant professor of marketing at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
It was published Nov. 3 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Are older adults more gullible?
Numerous previous studies have shown that older adults spread more misinformation. One found that during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook users over the age of 65 shared almost seven times more fake news than adults under age 30. On Twitter, 80% of fake news was shared by users over age 50.
The reason remains a matter of debate.
Some research has pointed to age-related cognitive decline, suggesting that older adults are less able to think analytically and more vulnerable to being duped. Other studies show they are more likely to confuse the origin of a piece of information and often fail to distinguish paid ads from objective news.
In contrast, a recent meta-analysis of 31 studies concluded that older adults are better than young adults at spotting fake news.
In 2022, Van Boven and co-author Ramos, who was at CU as a visiting PhD student from the Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration (FGV-EBAPE) in Rio de Janeiro, decided to take a deeper look.
At the time, misinformation storms swirled across both countries around the upcoming midterms in the U.S. and the controversial runoff between presidential candidates Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
The researchers recruited 700 participants in Brazil and 1,700 in the U.S., ranging in age from 18 to 80.
Participants viewed news headlines related to political events in their country. Some painted Republican or conservative ideologies in a favorable light. Others favored Democrat or liberal ideologies. Unbeknownst to the participants, some headlines had been flagged by fact-checking websites to be false.
For instance, one widely circulating, false pro-Republican headline in the U.S. read:
"Pope Frances shocks world and endorses Donald Trump for President."
A pro-liberal and false headline widely circulating in Brazil read:
"Bolsonaro wants to cut 25% of civil servants' salaries."
Participants were asked, "How likely would you be to share this news in your social media?" In a follow-up experiment, participants were also asked whether the claim was, to the best of their knowledge, true or false.
Researchers also assessed respondent's political ideology and ability to "override their intuitions and think analytically."
The trouble with partisanship
The research found no evidence that older adults are less able to think analytically and distinguish fake from real news.
It did find that the 55-and-older set was far more partisan and that partisanship shaped how critically they assessed headline accuracy.
"They had different standards of evaluating evidence depending on whether it reflected well on their side or not," said Van Boven.
The study stopped short of concluding that older adults knowingly share fake news. Instead, the study suggests that older adults are more skeptical when the news is favorable to "the other side." If it makes their candidate look good, "they tend to behave in a knee-jerk partisan fashion," assume it's true and share it, said Van Boven. The older people get, the stronger this reaction becomes.
Notably, this trend held true across political parties and across both the U.S. and Brazil, which currently has roughly 30 political parties.
"This suggests that the two-party system is not necessarily the issue here," said Ramos. "People in Brazil behave in the same partisan way."
Stepping out of the echo-chamber
Many interventions developed to combat misinformation have centered around helping people distinguish truth from fiction.
"Our study suggests that it is equally important to encourage people to behave in a less politically partisan way when they are communicating on their social networks," said Van Boven.
He recommends that people take a hard look at what, and how much, they are posting, and how their own partisanship may be influencing the way they vet headlines.
In addition, said Ramos, stop unfriending people you disagree with politically.
"As someone who studies political polarization, I am very much in favor of inter-group contact. It's critical for a healthy democracy that we can talk to and have friends who think differently."
