Why Are Old People Conned? It’s Because of Memory

    Everybody has heard of conmen. These individuals try to scam others out of money or goods by running some sort of con. Although this is horrible, conmen usually try to focus on elderly people. This is because older people are more susceptible to scams and cons, due to their memory.
    A conman might be one that has done a service for an elderly person. When payment comes around, the scam artist might say, “As we talked about before, you agreed to pay me \\$2,000 for my work.” The actual agreement might have been for \\$1,000, but the elderly person won’t remember it. Instead of claiming evidence to support otherwise, this simple con may be enough to have an elderly person pay more money. Dr. Larry Jacoby says that deteriorating memory is what causes this susceptibility.
    Dr. Jacoby feels that these automatic influences of memory mislead elderly people and have them wrongly think that they remember something that didn’t actually happen. His research has shown the power of the automatic, or unconscious, form of memory. Experiences can trigger this memory but the conscious memory keeps control over the automatic memory. However, with age, the conscious memory decreases. This allows the automatic memory to run without resistance. This causes memory lapses, which create older people’s susceptibility to scams.
    Therefore, the elderly can be influenced by suggestions of things that didn’t actually occur. This is because they are not able to recall what actually did happen, with the deterioration of conscious memory. As horrible as it may sound, people try to take advantage of these memory lapses. That is how conmen effectively scam elderly people.

As You Get Older, You Think You Get Wiser

    Everybody makes decisions every single day. However, everybody also has the tendency to remember only the positive aspects of their decisions. Generally, people remember their decisions as being good, and do not focus on the negative consequences that arise from them. This belief is extremely high in elderly people.
    In a study done by Mara Mather, Ph.D., and Marcia Johnson, Ph.D., older people were found to put a positive spin on the decisions they make. The doctors presented young and old adults with four decisions. There was some positive and negative information relating to each decision. After making the decisions, the subjects were asked to give an analysis of the decisions they had made.
    The older people were much more likely than the younger subjects to find positive aspects to the options they had chosen and negative aspects to those that they did not select. This was true even when overall memory was equal. The psychologists attribute this tendency to the inclusion of emotions with decisions. People generally try to make decisions that are emotionally pleasing. With older people, these emotions may be an important source of information, as the ability to undergo complex processes decreases with age.
    The bias that older individuals show in their decision-making may be a way for older people to regulate emotion. Although it is not clear right now why this occurs, older people do look at their decisions as being wiser, as they remember only the positive qualities in their decisions.

Does Age Really Guarantee a Loss of Memory?

     To this question, many people would automatically say yes. However, studies recently done have shown that this may not be the case. In fact, source memory may be weak because of frontal-lobe changes, and this can even be fixed.
     Elizabeth Glisky, Ph.D., Susan Rubin, M.A., Patrick Davidson, M.A., have conducted four studies that have gone against the popular belief. They found that only some elderly people (those over 65 years old) suffer greater losses in contextual (source) memory than in memory for facts. When this does occur, the frontal lobe seems to be impaired in some way, and this only happens in some people as they age. Also, the psychologists have found out a way for older people to improve their memory which involves context.
     In these studies, the experimenters took a group of elderly individuals and a group of college undergraduates. The subjects were tested for frontal-lobe efficiency and studied the association between this efficiency and the efficiency in remembering source information. This source memory is much more complex and demanding than memory for simple facts, as it includes all contexts with events. This captures all details and decisions involved in events, adding to the complexity of source memory.
     The studies showed that the subjects with good frontal-lobe efficiency did not demonstrate weakness in source memory. The opposite is true, as bad efficiency led to problems in source memory. This shows that aging is not the main culprit to deter orating source memory, but frontal-lobe efficiency is. The elderly people with good frontal lobe results demonstrated good source memory.
     To combat this problem with source memory, the researchers recommend concentrating on the relation between an item and its context. When these relations are focused on, it is easier to recall events, which comes from source memory. Older people may have to focus especially on encoding these relations so that they can remember the events later.
     That means that people who are aging should not necessarily feel their memory will decline. And even if they do have problems remembering specific events and the information surrounding them, focusing on the relation of the item and its context can help them through this problem.