Debiasing older adult’s facial trustworthiness bias:

Effects of an investment game played with younger adults

Abstract

We examined whether playing an investment game (Suzuki, 2018) while chatting with younger adults corrected older adults’ bias in guesses about trustworthiness of others based on their facial appearance. Older adults (N = 48) participated in the study. The participants played an investment game under three conditions: alone, with older adults they had met for the first time, or with younger adults they had met for the first time. After playing the game, the participants responded to a trustworthiness memory test. Multinomial processing tree model analysis of the recognition data indicated that only the older adults who played the investment game with younger adults did not rely on facial appearance when guessing the trustworthiness of others. The results and the discussion of this study suggest useful measures for preventing older adults’ fraud victimization.