How Following Gut Instincts Might Help Prevent Being Scammed

Avoiding scams: Study shows the elderly may benefit from learning body cues.

Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Key points

• The elderly are particularly at risk for being scammed.
• Research suggests that among older adults, greater bodily awareness is linked to the ability to detect scams.
• When someone has high interoceptive accuracy, they are likely more gifted with an accurate gut instinct. 

Anyone with a mobile phone knows how prevalent scams have become. Whether perpetrated by text, email, social media, or phone calls, fraudulent schemes abound. The elderly are particularly at risk for being scammed, as their thought processes might not be quite as sharp, loneliness may make them more prone to engaging with a scammer, and with more time on their hands, they may give more scammers the benefit of the doubt rather than just deleting the email or hanging up the phone in a rush.

A recent study published in the Journals of Gerontology suggests that there can be a ray of hope. Researchers at the University of Florida, led by Natalie Ebner, Ph.D., have discovered that among older adults, higher levels of bodily awareness were correlated with a higher ability to detect phishing schemes and lying.

The study played out like this: more than 100 American adults were recruited, and divided categorically by age. In one group were college-aged people in their early 20s, and in the other were older adults ranging in age from 43 to 82, with a mean age of 69. First, participants were measured in terms of their ability to detect their heartbeat without taking their pulse. What this assesses is something referred to as interoceptive accuracy; it's your ability to detect your body's sensations and cues—in short, how in touch you are with your physical experience.

The idea of interoceptive accuracy aligns well with the idea of a "gut instinct." Our bodies give us all kinds of data on a minute-to-minute basis, from signs of hunger, thirst, tiredness, and sickness to more emotional cues of fear, anger, and sadness. It would stand to reason that when someone has high interoceptive accuracy, they are likely more gifted with an accurate gut instinct.

What kind of things in the real world would a gut instinct be valuable in helping detect? Lying seems a particularly important one. Sure enough, in the second part of the study, the researchers assessed participants' abilities to detect a scam—in the form of an email phishing scheme—and also to see who was lying in real news footage. In the news footage task, participants were shown real videos of people pleading for the return of their missing loved ones, but some of the people in the videos were later convicted of murdering them, revealing that their pleas had been dishonest.

Indeed, the people who had higher interoceptive accuracy—better assessment of their bodily cues—were more accurate in the latter two tasks. But there was a catch. This association held true only in the older adults, not the younger ones. The researchers suggest that maybe this association wasn't strong in the younger group because they possessed other cognitive tools to try to make the decision about whether there was lying or fraud. Perhaps they could make the decision with more astute reasoning, no matter what their body was doing. And at least with the phishing detection task, they may have more sophistication with technology in order to not be as likely to be tricked.

This remains good news, however, since the elderly are targets of widespread and serious fraud more often than any other age demographic. Might it be that by helping older adults learn to be more attuned to their bodily sensations, they can develop a more accurate warning system for when they are being scammed, and thus prevent serious financial loss—or worse? Or could it be that adults who have better instincts in the first place also have other tools to be able to detect lying? Perhaps the direction of causality is reversed—that there is something about being good at detecting deception that in turn allows you to be better at detecting your heartbeat. With further research, this can all be teased out, and let's hope it happens sooner rather than later. After all, when it comes to the tragedy of the exploitation of the elderly, we need all the preventative tools we can get.