Tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Roper v. Simmons, a case that considers whether the Eighth Amendment prohibits capital punishment for crimes committed at the age of 16 or 17. One of the interesting questions potentially implicated by the case is whether people who are 16 and 17 tend to make less mature judgments than adults.
As best I can tell, the most relevant scientific study on this question is Elizabeth Cauffman & Laurence Steinberg, (Im)maturity of Judgment in Adolescence: Why Adolescents May Be Less Culpable than Adults, 18 Behav. Sci. & Law 741-760 (2000). An excerpt from the abstract summarizes the basic goals and conclusions of the study:
This study examines the influence of three psychosocial factors (responsibility, perspective, and temperance) on maturity of judgment in a sample of over 1,000 participants ranging in age from 12 to 48 years. Participants completed assessments of their psychosocial maturity in the aforementioned domains and responded to a series of hypothetical decision-making dilemmas about potentially antisocial or risky behavior. Socially responsible decision making is significantly more common among young adults than among adolescents, but does not increase appreciably after age 19. Individuals exhibiting higher levels of responsibility, perspective, and temperance displayed more mature decision-making than those with lower scores on these psychosocial factors, regardless of age. Adolescents, on average, scored significantly worse than adults, but individual differences in judgment within each adolescent age group were considerable.
The study isn’t available online, but I obtained a copy and gave it a quick read. (Or at least I tried — it’s not easy stuff to understand.) A few quick thoughts about the study:
(1) The data was generated from self-reported questionnaires. Subjects of different ages were asked to report how they would respond in various hypothetical situations, and the authors of the paper reached their conclusions about the maturity of people of different ages by assuming that the answers were accurate. I am no expert on these matters, but I wonder if this method introduces a potential bias: I can imagine that adults might feel obligated to describe their behavior and reactions as more mature than adolescents.
(2) The authors compared the attitudes of juveniles to young adults by comparing the attitudes of junior high and high school students to the attitudes of college students. Again, this seems like a possible source of bias: my sense is that as you go up the educational ladder, you begin to see a smaller cross-section of persons of a given age. Lots of people don’t go to college, and it seems plausible that the subset of persons who go to college are likely to be more mature than others. To the extent that the paper finds that high school students are less mature than college students, we might wonder whether this is a characteristic of people who go to college rather than a characteristic of their age.
(3) The authors conclude that “[i]ndividuals differ considerably in the timing of the development of psychological maturity, making it difficult to define a chronological boundary between immaturity and maturity.” (p758) At the same time, they find that “some time during late adolescence” most people have a jump in their level of psychosocial maturity. For the purpose of the study, the authors define psychosocial maturity as a combination of three factors: a person’s sense of personal responsibility for their actions, the degree to which a person recognizes both short and long-term consequences of their actions, and a person’s ability to exercise restraint and self-control over their actions.
UPDATE: After reading over the conclusions of the study one more time, I think I was a bit inaccurate in saying that the study finds a “jump” in maturity in late adolescence. Rather, the study finds that the psychosocial maturity of most people reaches a plateau after late adolescence, and that there is “important progress” in the development of psychosocial maturity during the period of late adolescence.
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