Loneliness could lead to risk of fraud victimization for middle-aged and older adults.

Abstract

Older adults have a strong desire for emotional connectivity and those who lack such social connectedness would be easily taken advantage of and experience fraud. We aimed to examine the association between loneliness and fraud victimization and further investigate the causal relationship through experimental manipulation. Fifty younger adults (aged 18-29, $M_{\mathrm{age}}$ = 26.62), 43 middle-aged adults (aged 32-53, $M_{\mathrm{age}}$ = 40.84) and 54 older adults (aged 60-88, $M_{\mathrm{age}}$ = 68.31) were randomly assigned to induced loneliness or control conditions by a complete randomized design and then were asked to rate the credibility and purchase intention for nine misleading advertisements. Middle-aged and older adults, but not younger adults, showed higher susceptibility to fraud after loneliness manipulation. The present experiment confirmed that loneliness could lead to higher fraud victimization for middle-aged and older adults, suggesting future interventions should target those lonely middle-aged and older adults to prevent potential fraud.