A Microsimulation of Well-Being and Literacy Interventions to Reduce Scam Susceptibility in Older Adults

Poor financial and health literacy and poor psychological well-being are significant correlates of scam susceptibility in older adults; yet, no research has examined whether interventions that target these factors may effectively reduce susceptibility. Using longitudinal data from older adults in the Rush Memory and Aging Project (MAP) (N = 1,231), we used microsimulations to estimate the causal effect of hypothetical well-being and literacy interventions on scam susceptibility over six years. Microsimulations can simulate a randomized trial to estimate intervention effects using observational data. We simulated hypothetical interventions that improved well-being or literacy scores by either 10% or 30% from baseline, or to the maximum scores, for an older adult population and for income and education subgroups. Simulations suggest that hypothetical interventions that increase well-being or literacy cause statistically significant reductions in scam susceptibility of older adults over time, but improving well-being caused a greater—albeit not significantly different—reduction compared to improving literacy.