Age shapes how brains respond to guilt-based deceptive advertising

Imagine sitting across from a friendly salesperson who has just told you a short story about their difficult family situation. A moment later, they begin describing a health product that sounds almost too good to be true. You might think you are weighing the facts about the product, but this study asks a different question: how much of your decision is shaped by emotion, age, and what is happening in your brain while you listen?

A recent study in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience examined how younger and older adults respond to face-to-face deceptive sales pitches that rely on false advertising, with and without a guilt-inducing backstory. The research team looked not only at what people decided to buy, but also at how their brains responded in real time as they interacted with a salesperson. The results point to a pattern where older adults tend to buy more from false advertising in general, while younger adults are especially swayed when guilt is brought into the picture.

Setting the stage: financial fraud, guilt, and aging

Financial fraud through false advertising involves promising benefits that are exaggerated, unproven, or simply untrue. These messages can push consumers toward decisions that end in financial loss. Reports suggest that older adults often lose more money to such schemes, and previous work has found that they may be more likely than younger adults to accept misleading product claims.

Psychology of Selling

Sign up for our free weekly newsletter for the latest insights.

Name

Email

At the same time, advertising often relies on emotions rather than just facts. One common tactic is a guilt appeal. This might involve drawing attention to someone’s hardship or a moral duty to help, which can make people feel uneasy if they do not respond. Past studies have shown that guilt appeals can increase the likelihood that people will support a cause or buy a product, possibly because spending money feels like a way to ease that discomfort.

The picture becomes more complex when age is taken into account. Older adults are often described as more prosocial and may care more about helping others. On the other hand, they also tend to regulate negative emotions more successfully than younger adults. Some work has suggested that older adults may be less driven by guilt in their decisions, especially when emotional reactions are muted by age-related changes in brain regions such as the amygdala.

The brain’s prefrontal cortex, located at the front of the head, plays a central role in judging information, controlling impulses, and integrating emotion with decision-making. It is also one of the regions most affected by aging. Changes in how this area connects with itself and with other regions may affect how people process deceptive information. The researchers in the current study wanted to know how these age-related differences appear during live, face-to-face sales situations, rather than in more artificial, computer-based tasks.

To explore this question, Ying-Chen Liu and colleagues at Southwest University in China, together with coauthors from Technische Universität Dresden and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, designed a study that brought consumers and salespeople into the lab for controlled but naturalistic sales conversations. They focused on how guilt appeals and false advertising interact with age, behavior, and brain activity.

The investigation: face-to-face sales and shared brain activity

The research team recruited 30 younger adults between 18 and 25 years old and 28 older adults between 65 and 83 years old. Older participants were screened to rule out cognitive impairment. The two age groups were matched on several background traits, including a questionnaire that measured susceptibility to deception and another that assessed social isolation.

Four university students were trained to act as salespeople. Each participant played the role of a consumer and met with a salesperson in two separate sessions. In each session, the consumer and salesperson sat facing each other at a fixed distance, mimicking a real sales conversation while controlling the social environment.

The core of the experiment involved two types of sales pitches that both used false advertising. The products were described with claims such as a “100 percent bacteria elimination rate” or a cure for cardiovascular disease, which were intentionally unrealistic. What changed between conditions was the story that came before the pitch. In the guilt condition, the salesperson described a life story involving hardship and a difficult family background. In the control condition, the salesperson instead described an average, more neutral background.

Each session followed the same structure. There was a short resting period, a brief introduction of the salesperson, and then a sales phase involving four products. After each pitch, consumers rated how much they wanted to buy the product and how credible they found the advertising claims. At the end of each block, they also rated how trustworthy they found the salesperson, how manipulative the pitch felt, and how guilty they felt.

At the same time, the researchers used a technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS, to record brain activity from both the consumer and the salesperson. fNIRS tracks changes in blood oxygen levels in the cortex, similar in concept to functional magnetic resonance imaging, but with a cap of light sources and detectors that can be worn during a conversation. In this study, the sensors were placed over the prefrontal cortex, the region linked to evaluation, control, and social reasoning.

Because both people were being scanned at the same time, the method is known as “hyperscanning.” This allowed the researchers to examine not only how different regions within a person’s prefrontal cortex were linked during the sales task, but also how the salesperson’s and consumer’s brains became synchronized while they interacted. They then combined these neural measures with the behavioral ratings to see how patterns in brain activity lined up with perceived credibility, trust, and purchase decisions.

What they found: age, guilt, and the social brain

The guilt manipulation worked as intended. When the salesperson described a difficult family situation, both younger and older adults reported stronger feelings of guilt and more negative emotions. Younger adults, however, also reported that the guilt condition felt more manipulative. Older adults did not show this difference between guilt and control, which led the researchers to treat perceived manipulation as a factor to account for in their main analyses.

When it came to purchasing decisions, age and sales approach combined in a notable way. Across both guilt and control conditions, older adults reported higher purchase intentions for the falsely advertised products than younger adults. In other words, when facing deceptive claims, older adults were more willing overall to say they would buy.

Younger adults, in contrast, showed a strong shift between conditions. Their purchase intentions were significantly higher in the guilt condition than in the control condition. Older adults did not show a meaningful change between those two conditions. So while older adults were generally more willing to buy, younger adults were the ones whose decisions moved in response to the guilt story.

The ratings of advertising credibility and salesperson trust followed a similar age pattern. Older adults judged the ads as more credible and the salespeople as more trustworthy than younger adults did, regardless of condition. For both age groups, higher purchase intentions were linked with higher perceived credibility and higher trust in the salesperson, suggesting that these subjective impressions were closely tied to the decision to buy.

In the brain data, the team focused on two levels. First, they examined how different prefrontal regions within each consumer’s brain were coordinated during the sales phase. In younger adults, guilt appeals were associated with stronger connections between language-related areas and the front-most part of the prefrontal cortex, as well as between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the frontopolar region.

These links are thought to support processes such as holding information in mind, weighing options, and integrating emotional and verbal content. Older adults did not show meaningful differences in these connections between guilt and control conditions.

Second, the researchers looked at synchronization between the salesperson’s and consumer’s brains. In younger consumer–salesperson pairs, brain activity in language and prefrontal regions became more synchronized during guilt-based pitches than during control pitches. This pattern did not appear in pairs with older consumers. The heightened synchronization in the younger group suggests that guilt appeals aligned the timing of neural responses between speaker and listener during the sales interaction.

The final step in the analysis connected these brain patterns with people’s judgments about the ads and the salespeople. The researchers used a comparison approach that looked at how similarly different participants rated credibility or trust, and how similar their brain activity patterns were in specific regions. For younger adults, activity in the frontopolar cortex tracked with advertising credibility. When two younger participants judged an ad as similarly credible, their brain activity patterns in this region during the pitch also tended to look more alike.

For older adults, the story was different. In the same frontopolar region, similarity in brain activity was linked to similarity in ratings of the salesperson’s trustworthiness, rather than to similarity in credibility ratings in both conditions. In other words, older adults’ brain patterns in this area aligned more with how they judged the salesperson as a person, while younger adults’ patterns aligned more with how they judged the ad itself.

Both age groups also showed links between frontopolar activity and purchase intentions, which supports the idea that this region plays a central role in deciding whether to buy or pass in the face of deceptive claims.

What’s next: limits and new questions

As with any lab-based research, this study captures only part of a complex real-world problem. The sales interactions took place in a controlled environment, with trained student salespeople, scripted pitches, and specific kinds of false claims. In everyday life, scams and misleading sales tactics often occur in very different settings, such as phone calls, door-to-door visits, or online platforms where the cues and pressures are not the same.

The brain recordings were also limited to the prefrontal cortex. Other regions, such as areas involved in understanding others’ mental states or processing emotional tone, were not measured. These regions may also contribute to how people respond to guilt appeals and false advertising.

The participants in this study came from a specific cultural and educational context and may not represent all younger and older adults worldwide. Attitudes toward salespeople, authority, and helping others can vary across cultures, and those differences might shape both behavior and brain responses in similar tasks.

These boundaries point to several questions for future work. One question is whether similar age patterns would appear in more naturalistic environments, such as markets, shopping centers, or online live-stream sales. Portable fNIRS systems could make it possible to examine brain activity while people move through those spaces.

Another question concerns other emotional tactics. The present study focused on guilt appeals tied to a salesperson’s hardship. Researchers could examine how fear-based messages, pride appeals, or social pressure influence younger and older adults in comparable face-to-face settings. Comparing different emotions could help identify which feelings most strongly shift attention away from content and toward the person delivering the message.

A further line of research could explore ways to reduce vulnerability. For older adults, the findings suggest that trust in the salesperson may play a central role in decisions about deceptive offers. Future studies might test whether training programs that emphasize critical evaluation of claims, independent of the person presenting them, can change both behavior and brain patterns. For younger adults, work might examine whether recognizing guilt-based tactics in advance reduces the shift in purchase intentions when those tactics are used.

Finally, longitudinal studies could investigate how these patterns change across the lifespan. Tracking the same individuals as they age could help clarify how changes in brain connectivity and emotion processing shape responses to fraudulent advertising over time.

In this study, deceptive sales pitches provided a window into how people of different ages navigate a mix of emotion, trust, and information. Older adults tended to accept false advertising more readily, while younger adults were especially responsive to guilt-laden backstories. At the neural level, younger adults’ brains appeared to focus more on the messages themselves, whereas older adults’ brains aligned more with their sense of the salesperson’s character.

Together, these findings sketch an age-specific map of vulnerability to consumer fraud in face-to-face encounters and set the stage for future work on how to protect people from deceptive marketing at different stages of life.