Immaturity Theory; Frankly I Resent That

Discovery News makes me wonder whether they will be reporting all new theories that come up, no matter how odd they are or how little evidence they have. This one argues that people are en masse becoming less mature. To whit:

The theory's creator is Bruce Charlton, a professor in the School of Biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of Medical Hypotheses, which will feature a paper outlining his theory in an upcoming issue.

Charlton explained to Discovery News that humans have an inherent attraction to physical youth, since it can be a sign of fertility, health and vitality. In the mid-20th century, however, another force kicked in, due to increasing need for individuals to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends.

A "child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge" is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world, Charlton believes. Formal education now extends well past physical maturity, leaving students with minds that are, he said, "unfinished."

"The psychological neoteny effect of formal education is an accidental by-product -- the main role of education is to increase general, abstract intelligence and prepare for economic activity," he explained.

"But formal education requires a child-like stance of receptivity to new learning, and cognitive flexibility."

...

While the human mind responds to new information over the course of any individual's lifetime, Charlton argues that past physical environments were more stable and allowed for a state of psychological maturity. In hunter-gatherer societies, that maturity was probably achieved during a person's late teens or early twenties, he said.

"By contrast, many modern adults fail to attain this maturity, and such failure is common and indeed characteristic of highly educated and, on the whole, effective and socially valuable people," he said.

"People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact." (Emphasis mine.)

First, the title for this article in Discovery News was "Serious Study: Immaturity Levels Rising." I am not sure how Discovery News is defining serious studies, but it sounds more to me like a serious hypothesis that smacks of conventional wisdom.

I am willing to buy that people are more immature than before, even though it is making me have flashbacks of "And we walked uphill both ways" lectures, but frankly I resent him highlighting my obvious social immaturity -- it's so rude. Just because I can't talk to normal people about anything but positron physics doesn't make me "strikingly immature."

In all seriousness though, I am not convinced that people are any more or less immature than they have always been. People are en masse not a particularly impressive lot, but I think this is has been more or less a fixity over any time scale over which we could reasonable speak.

Maybe this immaturity is being exposed more because more of the free range stupid are surviving to adulthood. George Carlin said, "The kid who eats too many marbles doesn't get to grow up to have kids of his own," but now we have marble protection. Maybe we hear more about immaturity because we get more news. Have you watched CNN lately? Immature may have been there before, but now he has a huge karaoke mike and is belting out "Sweet Child of Mine" at the top of his lungs.