We are all just big babies


http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/06/23/immature_hum.html?category=human&guid=2\
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Serious Study: Immaturity Levels Rising

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

June 23, 2006 -- The adage "like a kid at heart" may be truer
than we think, since new research is showing that grown-ups
are more immature than ever.

Specifically, it seems a growing number of people are
retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth.

As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve
mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on
evolutionary psychiatry.

Among scientists, the phenomenon is called psychological
neoteny.

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."

"When formal education continues into the early twenties,"
he continued, "it probably, to an extent, counteracts the
attainment of psychological maturity, which would otherwise
occur at about this age."

Charlton pointed out that past cultures often marked the
advent of adulthood with initiation ceremonies.

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."

Charlton added that since modern cultures now favor cognitive
flexibility, "immature" people tend to thrive and succeed, and
have set the tone not only for contemporary life, but also for
the future, when it is possible our genes may even change as a
result of the psychological shift.

The faults of youth are retained along with the virtues, he
believes. These include short attention span, sensation and
novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense
of cultural shallowness.

At least "youthfulness is no longer restricted to youth," he
said, due to overall improvements in food and healthcare,
along with cosmetic technologies.

David Brooks, a social commentator and an op-ed columnist at
The New York Times, has documented a somewhat related
phenomenon concerning the current blurring of "the bourgeois
world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture," which
Charlton believes is a version of psychological neoteny.

Brooks believes such individuals have lost the wisdom and
maturity of their bourgeois predecessors due to more emphasis
placed on expertise, flexibility and vitality.

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