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When Does Maturity Set In?
An anonymous reader writes "Two Dartmouth researchers claim that they are one step closer to discovering at what age human maturity sets in. From the article: 'For the study, Baird and graduate student Craig Bennett looked at the brains of nineteen 18-year-old Dartmouth students who had moved more than 100 miles to attend college. A control group of 17 older students, ranging in age from 25 to 35, were also studied for comparison. The results indicate that significant changes took place in the brains of these individuals. The changes were localized to regions of the brain known to integrate emotion and cognition. Specifically, these are areas that take information from our current body state and apply it for use in navigating the world.'"
You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.
God knows my colleagues agree!
Worthless research.
What constitutes maturity is not exactly well defined; these fellows just seem to have chosen a bunch of criteria (ability to navigate the world my ass) and proceeded on such basis.
The problem here isn't when people mature, that part's easy enough given an accepted definition of maturity. The problem is reaching that definition.
Do they allow people to do research now without the prerequisite of being able to distinguish between subjectivity and objectivity?
This research is like if I stated that the volume of an alarm clock is a good determinant of how likely one is to be a successful employee. There's just so much wrong with the premises it isn't even worth the few minutes to read.
Bad science has a home on slashdot, I see.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
I have also read, but I can't remember where and it's to friggin early for me to take the time to look it up, that drugs and alchol (certain amounts like a lot) can affect the brains development as an organ keeping it in the state of a younger brain.
This could be, and I think the study even said so, one of the reasons drunks and drug addicts act so immature if they have been doing it for a long time or started when they were kids.
I wonder if the study took enviormental factors such as this into account in the study.
Evolution or ID?
(read with tongue in cheeck)
so ehm... they take a bunch of older students as the control group. is that a smart idea? i'd take a bunch of people already working for a while, who have been confronted with Real Life (tm) and have developed into Maturity
Ditto that. Those changes would set in at 15, if the study had included young men and women that were forced to care for themselves at that age. Maturity comes from experience, not some legislated atomically accurate age. For crying out loud, it should be obvious that you can nail people to a measuring stick!
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
What an almost pointless study.
Maturity sets in when responsibility is a requirement.
Environment plays a heavy in maturity.
Multiple siblings I'm sure plays a role vs that of an only child as well as a parental death or divorce.
Circle of friends plays a role and none of this is an age requirement.
I've seen 10 year olds whose had a parent killed with more maturity than a 16 year old. That 10 year old will be a more mature 16 year old than a 20 year old drinking it up in a small college town.
A 22 year old with a handle on debt will be more mature than a 34 year old that is a renter in suburbia that is adamant that you can't make money in real estate.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
There has to be a statistical reason why your car insurance is so absurdly high when you're a late teen, with a steady decrease before a significant reduction at the age of 35. Certainly your appetite for risk behind the wheel doesn't completely reflect your all round maturity in life, but I'd suggest a strong correlation.
Aegilops
a) going to college changes your brain
b) being 18 and full of hormones changes your brain
c) both to varying extents
-- "You never mentioned comets before, Mac. This opens up a whole new area of negotiation." - Gordon Urquart
I'd say when someone can die for their country, they can drink alcohol. But y'know, that's just crazy old me.
I think we're talking about generalities here. When one particular person becomes "mature" is really irrelevent. If you were talking about height there's certainly 12 year olds that're taller than a 30 year old. That doesn't mean that there's not such a thing as growth spurts, and an age when most people are "full grown".
I also think there's a difference in brain maturity and being responsible. The researchers aren't studying "being responsible" as that would be quite hard to define and compare among different people in any kind of objective way. What they're studying is difference in brain structure, at different ages. What it sounds like they've found out is that generally speaking there is still brain development going on after age 18. To anyone that ever sees a lot of 18-20 year olds, compared to say anyone over 24 or 25 that really shouldn't be much of a surprise.
AccountKiller
Maturity sets in when responsibility is a requirement.
Seems to me you're exhibiting the same logical fallacy you're projecting on the study: confounding correlation with causation.
But before you can argue correlation or causation, you need to have data. As far as uselessness of the study, you're ignoring the importance of variation in the population as well. It's all well and good to say people get more mature as they get older, but it isn't always true, nor is always true in the same way. These variations are highly significant on a day to day basis, we're all aware of them, but in a very imprecise fashion.
Subjective impressions may do to be going on with, but precise and reproduceable data is more useful to the process. Normative data has to be the first step, even though it is of limited interest in itself. Once you have your baseline data, then you look at exceptional individuals and see what insight they give you into the process, for example the person who never moves out of his parent's house, or who never seems to learn no matter how many times he's burned.
Maybe at that future date you have complementary normative anatomical or neuroscience data to work with too showing precisely how a 34 year old brain functions differenly from an 18 year old one. This doesn't explain why 34 year olds are more mature.
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"nineteen 18-year-old Dartmouth students who had moved more than 100 miles to attend college" vs "A control group of 17..."
With a sample size that small you realy can't tell anything specific.
I don't know how they can try and publish a study where they look at such a small sample size, and assume the diffrence between the older and younger group's brain is based on maturity. Now if they had tracked 100 people from age 12 to 30 and compared brain scans with their behavior they could get good data but this study is worthless.
If you vote Republican before you are 20, you have no heart. If you vote Democrat after you are 20, you have no brain.
All you are noting is that many people, somewhere along the line, realize that idealism doesn't actually work.
Your 54 year old isn't immature, he's stupid. There's a difference.
The entire point of the study is meaningless. It's like asking "how much does it cost to buy a house?" Well, some houses are $100,000, some are $1,000,000, some are $10,000,000... Asking "at what age does maturity set in" is the same.
We don't ask "how light does your skin have to be for you to be a genius", since everyone recognizes that prejudging intelligence by skin color is wrong. Why do we persist in asking "how many years old do you have to be for you to be treated as a mature human being"?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
The headline is misleading. What it actually should be is:
"What differences are there in the brains of 18 and 25-35 year-olds? Do those differences help regulate behavior in a way that we traditionally refer think of as signifying 'maturity'?"
Unfortunately, that's too long, so we get this misleading one.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Oh, I agree. If you think about it, it's almost a social scientific scandal that there isn't better data. Getting data is expensive and difficult.
It's a bit of a vicious circle. Insufficient funding means weak data sets; weak data sets lead to conclusions that are heavy on speculation; overspeculative results lead to lost credibility; lost credibility means less funding.
But I do stand by this: it's not a good idea to dismiss the very idea of social scientific research because we are satisfied with our pet personal theories.
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...and I'm still waiting.
Still trying to think of a clever sig...
How do they know if they're measuring maturity or if they are seeing how the brain changes when a person has to adapt to significant new living conditions. Rather than just looking at 18 year old college students why not also look at:
14-15 year olds who have been sent off to boarding school.
Children of divorced parents who now move between two households and have to deal with step-families.
Children who have lost their parents and who are now being raised by relatives.
Saying that the brain changes when someone is put into a new situation where they are being forced to become more self-reliant is one thing, but labeling it "maturity" is a bit of a stretch. I know a fair number of pretty immature adults.
Hey, here's an idea - don't give someone the rights of an adult until their brain has gone through these changes! "No, I'm sorry, sir, the brain scan still indicates you are not ready to drink or vote. Shall we make an appointment for another scan next year?"
DD
"Can I finish? Can I finish?
You can see the same thing in the children of alcoholics and the like. Forced to become the responsible adults in the family, they often have to give up on their childhood in the process. Major psychological pitfalls often lie ahead for them.
Personally, I feel every child should have the opportunity to be a child, without major care or responsibility. It's not always been the historical precedent (adolescence, and especially the teenage period are relatively recent inventions within the last century or two), but I think it's been established as something necessary in today's society. Not to say that you shouldn't instill a sense of maturity and responsibility within your kids, but it's more along the lines of keeping their rooms clean and budgeting their allowance, not having to keep up the house finances and ensure that mummy and daddy get tucked into bed after they drink themselves into an alcoholic stupor.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
An interesting study would be to correlate brain changes with FICO scores. Fiscal responsibility and brain development might be related.
I see in other threads that some people equate "mature" with "not having fun". I believe that it is possible to behave in a mature fashion, but still enjoy life to the fullest. It makes sense to live life as fully as possible, since life is pretty short in the big scheme of things.
And speaking of maturity and responsibility, I better get back to work rather than burning time posting to slashdot.
==
You see 20 year olds voting for those politicians who CLAIM to care really care about the environment and the world's state. In other words those 20 year olds were young enough to be had.
The only thing that a politician cares about is power. A firm pre-requisite for power is staying in office and that means votes. There is a reason why writing your senator or congressman makes a difference, and why they're VERY, VERY interested in whether you're a registered voter when you do. It is why they employ teams of statisticians to crunch the NES data to help them determine how many voters they have to keep happy back home in order to stay in office. Politicians are very principled, and the primary principle they believe in is fooling enough of the people enough of the time to maintain their position.
By the way, who am I supposed to vote for to get a better job, a bigger loan, or more money? The only person who can get those things for you is yourself. Anyone who thinks a politician is going to hand it to them is a bigger fool than the 20 year olds you mentioned.
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I would say that most people mature into more stable and "mature" people between 25 and 30. Not that younger people can't make mature decisions, it's just that the consistency starts to set in. Women tend to mature a bit earlier while men hold on to the "crazy" years a bit longer.
Why do you think there's "SpikeTV?"
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Don't worry, it will catch up with them in the end ;)
Mind you, I've had arthritis since I was 15, which has lead to my philosophy on aging: you're never too young to be a geriatric, and never too old to have a happy childhood. Though the walking frame makes skateboarding a bit of a bugger...
Blank until
Of course people don't mature until their mid-to-late twenties. Why do you think that the U.S. military takes 18 to 26 year olds during drafts? It's because most 18 to 26 year olds aren't mature enough yet to have a nice, healthy fear of death, paralysis, disfigurement, etc. (This isn't a dig on anybody. I'm eternally grateful for the service of the men and women in the armed forces... it just takes a certain mindset that most people lose as they "mature".)
The Power to Serve
As you have shown, maturity was brought upon by the hefty requirement for survival. What I would wonder is how this might 'erode' over time as the responsibility is lessened, and/or they children are exposed to the more carefree individuals of a similar age.
Moreover, how well do your children interact with children of their own age? I have a family member who adopted a young girl from Russia. She's been with his family for a long time now and you really couldn't much tell where she came from, but in the beginning she seemed to carry a very heavy load.
Also, to you and all who are willing to give these children an extra chance at life: bless you, and may happiness smile upon you and your family.
Plenty? I hardly think there are plenty of examples of this in America. I doubt there are plenty of examples anywhere in Europe or Canada or Australia either. This is almost entirely a 3rd world problem.
A lot of children in broken families living in housing projects and the like in America might disagree. Living in those slums is almost like being in the Third World, I'd guess. Anecdotally, a lot of older children are taking care of the younger ones, especially when their parent(s) are incapacitated for some reason or other.doesn't set in until an individual is willing to take responsibility for ALL of their actions, good or bad. I've met young children who are very mature and senior citizens that refuse to take responsibility for anything in their lives.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Having tutored a PHD though quantitative methods (she had one and was working on the 2nd) I can tell you the required level of Statistical knowledge for a PHD is shit. This PHD program spent about as much time teaching them how to use SPSS as they spent trying build a foundation for understanding and applying statistics.
Anyway, I have read fair amount of "PHD" level research in neuroscience and it's full of tiny sample sizes, which does not mean it's a good idea. The problem with those sample sizes you don't know the underlying variability. You can guess it's distributed about a "standard bell curve" and that your "representative sample's" variability relates to the overall populations variability ect. But, you don't know shit about it. This study used two self-selecting populations (people that chose to go to over 100 miles to Dartmouth at 18 or they are 25 to 35 year old collage students.) and tiny sample sizes so even if the math seems to work out they don't know shit about what's going on.
Now, if they want to use this research to look for grant money to study what's going on fine, but don't publish this research like they discovered something.
PS: Granted I did not read the study only the linked article, but they did not imply that the control group where freshmen only "older students" and based on the quote. "During the first year of college, especially at a residential college, students have many new experiences," I can only assume the other participants where not necessarily freshmen so this is looking more like a fishing expedition than a look into how age relates to brain maturity. Now I could be wrong in this case after you see enough misrepresentation of research you will start hearing alarm bells every time you see a tiny sample used to backup a plausible argument. After all if they had used the same methods with 12 year olds and 60 year olds and found no difference in brain development how would you have interpreted the results? It's not that their methods are sufficient but the fact that their results are so expected that makes you willing to trust their results.
Maturity happens through experiances. There is no age for it. I have met 12 year olds who are more mature and functional in the real world then the people I go to college with. It is just a matter of how much criticle thinking you have to do for your own welfare.
I personally think this study is pretty meaningless in order to find out when maturity sets in. Your putting your subjects through a (somewhat) emotionally traumatic event and seeing what effects it has on the brain. The only thing I think this will do is see how does changing from an enviroment where responsibility is on someone else's shoulder to one where it is not effects the brain.
Never could figure out why my girl liked my bitch tits, then I found out she was a lesbian.