Cognitive and Metacognitive Predictors of Financial Exploitation:
Laura Cecilia Walzak, Wendy Loken Thornton · 2022
At the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and economics an emerging field of fraud susceptibility has begun to illustrate a detailed picture of factors from structural brain changes to social functioning declines that can lead to an increased risk for financial exploitation. While aging populations garner much of the focus of this research given their assumed increased susceptibility to financial exploitation, the literature has also greatly contributed to informing a more general understanding of fraud risks in adulthood. This chapter will provide an overview of cognitive markers across the adult lifespan that have been associated with declines in our ability to detect exploitation/fraud risk: namely numeracy, processing speed, attention, and executive functioning as well as global cognitive functioning. We will also present new findings from our laboratory indicating that an array of social/affective cognitive skills considered prerequisite for higher-level social analysis and interactions may be particularly salient when extended to the capacity to detect fraud/exploitation. Finally, this chapter will also highlight how such findings are creating avenues for earlier, more accurate identification of vulnerable groups with respect to fraud and informing the development of new tools to detect and reduce exploitation risk based on known cognitive markers.