Dubious News and the Aging American: Understanding Discernment and Engagement Among Older Adults

Why do older adults engage more with misinformation online, even when they often identify falsehoods correctly in surveys? In this talk, I investigate that paradox using a host of survey experiments and behavioral trace data. Analyses across multiple nationally representative samples show that older Americans disproportionately consume and share low-credibility political and health content -- but not due to simple cognitive decline or inability to detect false claims. Rather, this gap emerges from contextual and motivational factors. Older adults possess relatively high news literacy and cognitive reflectiveness, yet these traits do not reliably predict real-world sharing behavior. Instead, high political interest and strong partisan identity contribute to a heightened tendency to trust and share politically congruent misinformation among this group, and smaller, more like-minded social networks incentivize sharing it. Importantly, the media ecosystem older adults inhabit is asymmetrically skewed: most dubious online content leans right, intensifying engagement especially among older conservatives. This asymmetry helps explain why discernment ability appears high in controlled experiments with balanced content but breaks down in naturalistic settings. I extend these findings to health misinformation and video-based platforms to show that engagement patterns mostly generalize across domains and modalities, suggesting an underlying preference for clickbait among these consumers. Ultimately, I argue that the age - misinformation relationship is less about cognitive vulnerability than about interactions between identity, social context, and the media environment. 

Speaker: Ben Lyons, University of Utah

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