Adolescent Maturity, Essay Example

In course of human life, people of different ages are perceived differently by society due to the fact that the level of their development is considered to vary from age to age. The differences in perception regard, inter alia, the level of responsibility for one’s actions which society ascribes to people of different ages depending on the stage of their development. Thus, for example, little children receive less serious punishment for their misdemeanors than adults as it is generally considered that the former are too young to fully understand and predict the consequences of their actions. In terms of judiciary system aiming at reasonable application of the existing law to offenders, age differences of the latter often constitute a circumstance that may dramatically influence the course of court proceedings and the eventual decision on the punishment applicable to the defendants.

In order to render justice with the most relevance to the situation, lawyers have to resort to professional psychological studies, as it occurred in two most demonstrative trials at the U.S. Supreme Court: the 1990 Hodgson v. Minnesota trial concerning a minor’s right to obtaining abortion without preceding parental notification, and the 2005 Roper v. Simmons trial as the result of which the age boundary of individuals who could be executed for capital crimes was raised from 16 to 18 years. In both cases the Supreme Court relied extensively on the recent findings of developmental science which were submitted by the American Psychological Association (APA) and based on relevant research on psychological development during adolescence. Yet, there emerged an obvious discrepancy in the position of APA, as in first case adolescents were claimed to be characterized by a level of development adequate for taking independent and reasonable decisions on the necessity of abortion, while in the second case they were denied the maturity level sufficient enough to be fully responsible for criminal actions up to the age of 18 years, since the typical characteristics of their development could be summed up as “underdeveloped sense of responsibility, heightened vulnerability to peer pressure, and the unformed nature of characters” (Steinberg et al., 2009).

Such contradiction in view on adolescents within one professional organization (APA) inevitably lead to questioning of its ethical grounds and objectivity of its studies. As scientists are morally obliged to enter social and political issues on condition of utmost credibility of their research, an effort was undertaken by the members of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice to investigate the reasons underlying the contradictive findings of APA and to prove the hypothesis that APA’s seemingly discrepant data actually was in accordance with the difference in context of the two situations researched. Whereas adolescents’ and adults’ cognitive abilities involved in situations of taking decisions on abortions are on the same level of development, their psychological maturity which matters in crime committing situations is not equal; therefore, while adolescents of 15-16 years of age might demonstrate adult level of maturity in cognitive development, their psychological characteristics still remain immature at that age.

Aiming at examining the variations in cognitive and psychological capacities at different ages, The MacArthur Juvenile Capacity Study collected data from 935 “average” individuals with the age range of 10-30 years who volunteered to participate in the study on their own accord. The computerized procedure of the study involved three sets of measures, the most relevant of which were demographic measures (age, gender, ethnicity, and highest level of education within the household) and IQ, five measures of psychosocial capacities (risk perception, sensation seeking, impulsivity, resistance to peer influence and future orientation), and the tests of basic intellectual functioning (resistance to interference in working memory, a digit-span memory test, and a test of verbal fluency).

The results of the tests showed that on the one hand, psychological maturity of individuals did not show much difference in the age range of 10-17 years but became obvious between individuals of 16-17 and those older than 20 years; on the other hand, while there were significant differences in cognitive capacity observed in age groups of 10-16 years, none of such appeared among individuals older than 16 years. On the basis of the data obtained, a conclusion was reached that individual’s cognitive capacity develops and achieves adult levels much earlier than one matures psychologically — a fact vital for adequate decisions on various judiciary situations. In abortion decision one’s cognitive abilities are involved, which are developed early enough to take a reasonable decision on the case — thus an adolescent can be given a right to take that decision without parental notification; criminal action activates psychological capacities, which have not reached sufficiently mature levels by the age of 16 — therefore different sanctions should be applied to juvenile delinquents compared to those imposed on adults.

Relying on the results of their research, psychologists recommend that different attitude is applied to judging a situation, depending on the nature of capacities the situation activates: as by the age of 16 adolescents are capable of mature decision-making, they can be allowed independent actions in domains like “medical decision making, legal decision making, and decisions about participating in research studies”; and vice versa, in situations that provoke impulsive decisions from adolescents younger than 18 years their immaturity should be restrained by either imposing greater age restrictions on behavior or providing added protection to that age group.

References

Steinberg, L., Cauffman, E., Woolard, J., Graham, S., & Banich, M. (2009). Are adolescents less mature than adults?: Minors’ access to abortion, the juvenile death penalty, and the alleged APA “flip-flop”. American Psychologist, 64(7), 583-594. doi:10.1037/a0014763.