"Everybody knows" that the elderly are more trusting and therefore more gullible and more likely to fall for scams or buy overpriced stuff they don't need over the phone. Is this true? If so, why?
There's the onset of dementia, of course, but surely not all of the elderly are suffering from that condition.
One might say, with some justification, a few decades ago that grandma and grandpa grew up when everybody knew all their neighbors, left their doors unlocked, and when telephones were newfangled gadgets not used by foreign call centers for swindling.
Even if that nirvana where there were no swindlers existed, it's been a while since "the elderly" grew up in horse and buggy days. Phones would have been familiar all their lives, and in the last quarter century surely someone would have mentioned criminals use computers.
So are the elderly really more vulnerable to scammers? Why? Is it really only the subset who happen to have genuine dementia, or is there something about aging that makes all (most?) people more trusting or more compliant or whatever causes them to get scammed?
There's the onset of dementia, of course, but surely not all of the elderly are suffering from that condition.
One might say, with some justification, a few decades ago that grandma and grandpa grew up when everybody knew all their neighbors, left their doors unlocked, and when telephones were newfangled gadgets not used by foreign call centers for swindling.
Even if that nirvana where there were no swindlers existed, it's been a while since "the elderly" grew up in horse and buggy days. Phones would have been familiar all their lives, and in the last quarter century surely someone would have mentioned criminals use computers.
So are the elderly really more vulnerable to scammers? Why? Is it really only the subset who happen to have genuine dementia, or is there something about aging that makes all (most?) people more trusting or more compliant or whatever causes them to get scammed?
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1bRRuxF
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