![\"\"](\"https:\/\/3.bp.blogspot.com\/_b7Eh98KJ_qI\/TRl24ZubyfI\/AAAAAAAABME\/Zu1_kwHZDmA\/s1600\/evolution.gif\")
<\/a><\/div>\nThe Background Data:<\/strong><\/p>\n Hanson found an article<\/a> from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that suggested that, although there is an overall positive correlation between age and psychosocial maturity, this trend reverses during the teenage years. \u00a0In other words, the older you get, the more mature you are on average in situations involving others, but you\u2019re likely to regress as a teen. \u00a0I can\u2019t get the full text of the article, so I can\u2019t comment on the instrument they used to gauge maturity or how large any differences were. \u00a0Since my issue is with Hanson\u2019s interpretation, though, let\u2019s assume the methodology was perfect and any observed effects were large enough to care about.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s Hanson\u2019s take:<\/p>\n Many like to think that we become more \u201cmature\u201d as we age because our experience with life teaches us the wisdom of mature behavior. They then presume that teens would be better off acting more maturely, and should be forced to do so if necessary. However, this \u201cmaturity as learning\u201d theory conflicts with the fact that we become less mature as we become teens. An alternate theory, that better accounts for the above patterns, is that we are programmed to have different personalities and attitudes at different ages, because for our distant ancestors those attitudes were useful at those ages. Beware too easily assuming that others would be better off if they were more like you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Problem 1: Did you see any \u2018teens\u2019 in the Middle Ages?<\/strong><\/p>\n Beware too easily assuming that the modern understanding of stages of life have anything<\/em> to do with the lives of our \u2018distant ancestors\u2019 or the evolutionary pressures they faced. \u00a0The idea of \u2018teenager\u2019 or any intermediate step between childhood and adulthood is extremely modern and much <\/em>too recent to have any profound evolutionary impact. \u00a0Just because I can, I ran \u2018teenager\u2019 through the new Google Books ngram viewer<\/a> (it track mentions of a word or short phrase in the entire corpus of books Google has scanned. \u00a0You can read more here<\/a>). \u00a0Here\u2019s what the search turned up (click the image to enlarge):<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_b7Eh98KJ_qI\/TRl8nuD6JfI\/AAAAAAAABMI\/tAQenmwXMnM\/s400\/teen+ngram.png\")
<\/a><\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/4256452356987023523-7247019956061254575?l=www.unequally-yoked.com\")
<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"