Older and Younger Adults Perform Similarly in an Iterated Trust Game Telga, Maïka Lupiáñez Castillo, Juan Aging Individuation Age categories Gender categories Learning Trust This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, with pre-doctoral FPU fellowship FPU14/07106 to MT, and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, with research projects PSI2014-52764-P and PSI2017-84926-P to JL. This research is part of MT’s thesis dissertation under the supervision of JL. In social contexts, aging is typically associated with a greater reliance on heuristics, such as categorical information and stereotypes. The present research examines younger and older adults’ use of individuating and age-based categorical information when gauging whether or not to trust unfamiliar targets. In an adaptation of the iterated Trust Game, participants had to predict the cooperative tendencies of their partners to earn economic rewards in first encounters – in a context in which they knew nothing about their partners, and across repeated interactions – in a context in which they could learn the individual cooperative tendency of each partner. In line with previous research, we expected all participants to rely on stereotypes in first encounters, and progressively learn to disregard stereotypes to focus on individuating behavioral cues across repeated interactions. Moreover, we expected older participants to rely more on social categories than younger participants. Our results indicate that overall, both the elderly and the young adopted an individuating approach to predict the cooperative behaviors of their partners across trials. However, older adults more consistently relied on gender (but not age) stereotypes to make cooperation decisions at zero acquaintance. The impact of context, motivation, and relevance of categorical information in impression formation is discussed. 2021-11-23T09:32:40Z 2021-11-23T09:32:40Z 2021-10-12 journal article Telga M and Lupiáñez J (2021) Older and Younger Adults Perform Similarly in an Iterated Trust Game. Front. Psychol. 12:747187. doi: [10.3389/fpsyg.2021.747187] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/71683 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.747187 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ open access Atribución 3.0 España Frontiers Research Foundation