UM researchers have developed a questionnaire to assess susceptibility to financial scams. The Assessment of Situational Judgment asks people how likely they would be to follow through on eight real scams and nine legitimate situations where they would, for example, need to input their credit card information.
The study found that while older adults were in some cases better at discerning financial scams than younger ones, older adults with cognitive impairment were more likely to engage in both scams and legitimate scenarios. “If we could identify individuals at risk ... before they are scammed, we could protect them, their families and their assets,” says researcher James Galvin. The team is now collecting new data to test the questionnaire against measures of cognitive and functional ability and biological markers of brain health.
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