Why are older adults more likely to share misinformation online?

They have greater tendency to seek out, believe material that conforms to pre-existing views, expert says.

Originally published by Sy Boles Harvard Staff Writer on the Harvard Gazette, as per Media Relations guidelines page.

Image: Andrea Piacquadio / pexels

Older adults tend to do well at identifying falsehoods in experiments, but they’re also likelier than younger adults to like and share misinformation online.

That paradox was at the heart of a recent lecture as part of the Misinformation Speaker Series at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy.

The answer, according to Ben Lyons, a University of Utah communications assistant professor who studies media, politics, and misinformation, is partisanship and congeniality bias, essentially the tendency to seek out and believe information that supports pre-existing views while avoiding and dismissing conflicting data.

“Older adults show a lot more congeniality bias,” said Lyons, who published a paper in 2024 in Public Opinion Quarterly on the issue. “Older adults value accuracy, at least in their self-reports, but these age-linked political traits — interest and sophistication and intensity of partisan effects— might reshape what counts as accurate in practice, filtering truth through partisan identity.”

In his study, Lyons analyzed survey experiments of about 10,000 respondents and internet usage data from about 4,500 people. He found that adults older than 60 were about as skeptical of false headlines, on average, as younger people.

Despite that, older adults tended to be likelier to read and share misinformation than younger ones.

“Digital literacy does in fact decrease with age, not surprisingly.” — Ben Lyons

Lyons investigated common explanations for the paradox: that older adults have poorer digital literacy and that cognitive decline in some cases may exert a greater influence on decision-making.

The data, he found, were not so straightforward.

“Digital literacy does in fact decrease with age, not surprisingly,” Lyons said. “But news literacy is always higher in these samples; news literacy increases with age.”

In other words, adults over 60 had less skill and understanding of online environments, but more understanding of how news is produced.

Lyons also questioned the common wisdom that cognitive aging could make older adults more vulnerable to accepting online misinformation.

Cognitive aging is not all decline, he said. Older adults might lose episodic memory, processing speed, and fluid abilities, but they often score higher on tests of semantic memory, general knowledge, and emotional regulation — characteristics that might actually help them understand and engage with misinformation online.

To test that theory, Lyons looked at cognitive reflection — the ability to override initial responses that are intuitive but incorrect. That faculty increases with age, Lyons said, but the link between cognitive reflection and discernment decreases with age.

“Having greater cognitive reflection is associated with much more rejection of false news for younger adults … and for older adults, we see much less of an effect of cognitive reflection on their discernment.”

The same is true for emotional reactivity to the news.

“Older adults tend to rely more on prior knowledge, as a rule, as a general finding, to reduce cognitive load.” — Ben Lyons

Busting those myths helped Lyons home in on his theory of partisanship and congeniality bias.

“Older adults tend to rely more on prior knowledge, as a rule, as a general finding, to reduce cognitive load,” he explained. “But their prior knowledge, based on this consistently stronger partisanship, at least in the political domain, is more likely to be politically biased.”

But ultimately, Lyons noted, while a greater proportion of older adults share misinformation online than younger cohorts, the total percentage is still small.

Lyons was the final guest in the Shorenstein Center’s Misinformation Speaker Series in fall 2025. The series will resume this spring.

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by External Contributor via Digital Information World