Uncovering Risk Profiles of Deception and Mitigating Susceptibility to Scamming in Midlife and Older Age: A Novel Intervention Tool

The University of Miami neuropsychologists Bonnie Levin, PhD and Sarah Getz, PhD were awarded a grant for this important research project at the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute. The research is a collaboration with the McKnight Brain Institutes at the Universities of Florida and Arizona. The award for the research project Uncovering Risk Profiles of Deception and Mitigating Susceptibility to Scamming in Midlife and Older Age: A Novel Intervention Tool was awarded by the McKnight Brain Research Foundation (MBRF) through its Inter-Institutional Cognitive Aging and Memory Interventional Core.

This collaboration will specifically examine scamming in middle and older life, a pressing public health problem associated with decreased functional independence, increased financial dependency, lower quality of life, and a host of negative health outcomes. This project will attempt to understand the cognitive, socio-affective and neurobiological mechanisms underlying increased susceptibility to being deceived and poor decision making. Currently, there are no effective interventions to reduce scam susceptibility and the goal of this multi-site collaboration is to develop and validate a decision-supportive device to reduce online scam susceptibility in late midlife and older age.