Confidence in Judgments About News Veracity in Aging

Confidence about judgments plays a critical role in decision making. Miscalibration about accuracy of one’s judgment (under/overconfidence) can be harmful in decisions that involve risks and can reduce receptivity to conflicting factual information. Life experience may increase overconfidence because accumulated knowledge generally increases judgment confidence, yet because feedback about incorrect judgments is often absent, inflated beliefs about one’s judgment abilities can persist. In line with this theoretical account, age has been associated with judgment overconfidence. This study examined age-related differences in over/underconfidence as it applies to news veracity detection – a decision context with increasing importance given the current “infodemic”. Experiment 1 assessed over/underconfidence for real and fake news about commonly covered news topics (e.g., crime, politics) in younger (N=132; 18-24 years) and older (N=124; 61-81 years) adults. Experiment 2 included younger (N=133; 18-24 years) and older (N=119; 62-87 years) adults and used identical methods to Experiment 1, but presented news related to COVID-19, a topic for which younger and older adults had more equivalent lifetime exposure and thus should have more equivalent levels of judgment under/overconfidence. Results indicated overall underconfidence in news veracity detection (i.e., accuracy was higher than confidence in accuracy) across experiments. However, older age was associated with greater overconfidence for commonly covered news topics and real COVID-19 news, but judgment confidence levels were age-equivalent for fake COVID-19 news. These findings support the notion that aging is associated with greater overconfidence (or less underconfidence) in judgments, and greater life experience moderates judgment overconfidence.