In this writing, I want to show how common psychological
biases lead to the (largely incorrect) belief that young people in their
adolescent years are incompetent, immature, and incapable of responsibly making
decisions for themselves. In particular, it is evident that, while very young
children are naturally incapacitated, at some point people become competent to
make decisions for themselves, enter into contracts, and work, however, most of
the world draws the line at an inappropriately high age. The way I conclude
that the age of (most commonly) 18 is in fact too high an age, can be found
here, here, and here, so I will not focus on that here. Instead, I will explain why the vast majority of the
world incorrectly believes that young people are incompetent until the age
of 18, and continues to discriminate against youth ages 13-17 by using both
laws and social norms. (This article is written from mostly a US perspective. In the EU, the term "lacking capacity" or "incapacitated" is normally used, rather than "incompetent", for a person who lacks or is assumed to lack the mental capacity to make informed decisions for legal purposes.)
Anchoring Bias
It has long been known by psychologists that when people are
uncertain of a quantity or number, they become extremely susceptible to
external suggestions, though they may deny it. In “Judgment Under Uncertainty:
Heuristics and Biases”, Daniel Kahneman et
al. describe a simple experiment that demonstrates this phenomenon.
Volunteers were given a “wheel of fortune” to spin in order to give them a
number from 0 to 100. In fact the wheel was set up so that it gave some of the
subjects the number 10 and the other subjects the number 65. Subjects were then
asked whether the number on the wheel was higher than, or lower than, the
percentage of African countries belonging to the United Nations. Then the
subjects were asked to estimate the percentage of African countries belonging
to the United Nations. Those who received the number “10” estimated 25% on
average, while those that received the number 65 estimated 45% on average. In
other words, the number they were asked to compare to the percentage of African
countries belonging to the United Nations acted as an “anchor”, or reference
point, for the study subjects’ estimate of this number. The mere suggestion of
a number, even when the subjects were not deliberately led to believe it was an
estimate, acted to move the subjects’ estimate towards the given number.
In the case of the age of majority, the relevance of
anchoring bias should be fairly obvious – people in general do not, as a rule,
make an independent judgment of when persons are developed enough to make
decisions for themselves. Instead of using their own judgment, they “anchor”
onto the already-established age of majority. In other words, while they may
think, and even vocally insist, that they are using their own judgment, we
should not assume that they in fact are doing so. Instead, the “anchor” of the
pre-existing age of majority causes them to bias their thinking so that their
answer is pulled towards it. The age limits of 18 and 21 which are common to
the modern world originate not from any detailed discussion of psychological
development, rather, they come from military traditions. The age of 21 is often
said to come from the Middle Ages - in guidelines of regarding when men are
physically strong enough to carry body armor, whereas previously the age had
been set at 14 when armor was not required in battle and thus less physical
strength was needed. (“Studying
Children in Context: Theories, Methods, and Ethics” by M. Elizabeth Graue,
Daniel J. Walsh). The age of 21 remained in place for most of the Western world
up until around 1970 or so. In other words, people’s beliefs became “anchored”
to the age of 21. Then due to (in the US) a shortage of soldiers during the
Vietnam War, the US government began conscripting young men down to age 18
into the armed forces to fight in the war. Because it seemed greatly unjust for
people to be forced into the military and yet not be able to vote for the very
leaders that decided to put them into the war, the voting age was lowered to 18
in the U.S. and most states followed shortly by lowering their ages of majority
from 21 to 18. What we see is that 14, 21, and 18 have been at various points
in time considered the most appropriate age of majority, but that the shifts had
nothing to do with development or maturity, rather, they had to do with the
needs of that country’s military at the time. Once that number acted as the
“anchor”, people’s opinions shifted to match the “accepted” age. We can clearly
see how the same anchoring bias that is described by Kahneman has caused
most people to unwittingly almost totally suspend their own judgment – and that
traditional ages of majority may persist for hundreds of years without being
questioned!
Social conformity
In 1951, researcher Solomon Asch performed an experiment to
test the degree to which people tend to conform, under social pressure, to the
prevailing views of their peers – even against their better judgment. Three
vertical bars of various heights were placed in a box labeled “A”, “B”, and
“C”, and a fourth bar was placed outside the box. Participants of the
experiment were asked which bar – A, B, or C, matched the height of the bar
outside the box. Participants tested alone almost unanimously agreed since the
bar lengths were different enough that a normal observer could easily see the
correct answer. However, when other, “pretend” subjects were brought into the
room and told to all give the same incorrect answer, and the actual subject was
led to believe they were equal participants, nearly 40% of the experimental
subjects gave into the social pressure and chose an answer that should
obviously have been incorrect and the truth was staring them in the face!
[Source: Asch, S.E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, leadership and men(pp. 177–190). Pittsburgh, PA:Carnegie Press.]
Conformity also allows for social traditions to persist and
for prevailing attitudes to conform to traditions so that cultural variation
can swamp individual variation in determining what people believe about
fashion, beauty, family values, and of course, religion. But when it comes to
beliefs about matters such as the age of majority, the effect of conformity is
to further reinforce and strengthen the effect of anchoring bias, and suppress
independent thought and judgment in favor of simply agreeing with the law of
the land, without questioning it.
Obedience to
authority
Stanley Milgram is another person that has conducted famous
experiments in psychology that inform us of the factors that influence human
thought and behavior. Experiments were conducted at Yale. In his experiments,
subjects were told that they would be used to assist in an experiment on
another subject (who was actually an actor) stationed in a chair that could
deliver varying voltages of electricity to the (fake) subject, with the higher
voltages able to produce a painful shock. The (fake) subject was supposedly
involved in an experiment to test the effects of punishment on the memorization
of words. Subjects were told to administer higher voltages when the (fake)
subject “learner” made an error. Most of the actual subjects hesitated when it
became clear that the (fake) subject was experiencing painfully powerful
electric shocks. They wanted to stop pressing the button. However, whenever
this occurred, Milgram instructed them to continue, and told them that it is
absolutely essential to the experiment that they continue to press the button,
and that it is not optional that they press the button. Many of them went back
to pressing the button, and continuing to increase the voltage as the “test
subject” made errors. This continued to the point that the subjects of the
experiment were willing to deliver amazingly brutal and dangerous shocking
voltages to the “test subject” who pretended to be yelling in pain. Many of the
volunteers in the study delivered the maximum voltage – 450 volts (Typical
household electrical sockets are only 120 volts)! Of course the actual
electricity was not real and while participants suffered no physical harm or
death, many of the actual subjects later experienced disturbing emotional
consequences and regret regarding the way they behaved during the experiment.
[Surce: Milgram, Stanley (1963)."Behavioral Study of Obedience" Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 67 (4): 371–8. ]
The obedience to authority is another powerful effect that
causes people to suspend their better judgment and - in effect – do what they
are told, no matter the cost. Hence it is yet another factor that combines with
the others to suppress what would otherwise be disagreement with a socially and
legally accepted age of majority.
Prejudice
According to
Dictionary.com, prejudice is “an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed
beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason.” The word has two parts in
the stem, “pre-“ which means “before”, and “judice”, which is from the same
word root as “judgment”, “judge”, and “judicial”. So literally, prejudice is
judgment before the fact or facts. Prejudice is, of course, related to
discrimination, bias, and stereotyping but is not exactly identical to those.
It is usually used to refer to an attitude or thoughts about people belonging
to a category that is, often unconsciously and unwittingly, perceived as
inferior, for example a minority race, sex, or sexual orientation, gender
identity, socioeconomic/financial status or, yes, age.
Prejudice against
young people, specifically against teenagers /adolescents, can take a variety
of forms but there are quite close parallels between prejudice against youth
and other prejudices against groups of people that have in the past been
legally discriminated against even in “progressive” and “democratic” countries
such as the US, and many of these prejudices were almost universally accepted
along with the prejudice against youth. The thought process behind those
prejudices was very similar. For instance John Adams, in the 18th
century, explained it this way (QUOTE IS between the two rows of asterisks):
***************************************************************
“It is certain in
theory, that the only moral foundation of government is the consent of the
people, but to what an extent shall we carry this principle? Shall we say, that
every individual of the community, old and young, male and female, as well as
rich and poor, must consent, expressly to every act of legislation?...
…Why exclude women?
…Because their delicacy renders them unfit for practice and experience, in the
great business of life, and the hardy enterprises of war, as well as the
arduous cares of state. Besides, their attention is so much engaged with the
necessary nurture of their children, that nature has made them fittest for
domestic cares. And children have not judgment or will of their own…
Depend upon it, sir,
it is dangerous to open [such a] source of controversy and altercation, as
would be opened by attempting to [change] the qualifications of voters. There
will be no end of it. New claims will arise. Women will demand a vote. Lads
from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to, and every man,
who has not a [dime], will demand an equal voice with any other in all acts of state.
It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and [surrender] all ranks,
to one common level.”. (SOURCE: John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776; from
Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, Second President of the
United States (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1854). Accessed on web
site: John Adams, “John Adams Explains Why Women Should Not Be Able to Vote,” HERB:
Resources for Teachers, accessed June 9, 2017, https://herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1646.
*****************************************************************
A few key
observations may be noted here. One of them is that the people who are
disqualified tend to be thought of as inferiors – women are described as
“delicate” and “unfit”, and “children” (which included everyone under age 21)
as “having not judgment or will of their own”. But another phenomenon seems
quite interesting – many of the arguments against equal rights are based on an
improper generalization of some attribute to a group of people. In short, it is
a stereotype. For example, we see here that women, in contrast to men, are
“unfit… for the enterprises of war”. But so too are men, if they are sick, old,
disabled, etc. or even if they are pacifists/conscientious objectors. In other
words, what we see is a “hasty generalization” that improperly neglects
variations in individual circumstances. Perhaps an even better example is the
comment that women are in charge of the children and thus unfit to participate
in the economy. But this would not apply to childless women past menopause, nor
to women whose children are grown. Again we see the hasty generalization/stereotype.
One can also gather
a similarity from the LGBT debate – specifically some of the common arguments
against gay marriage – for instance, that it improperly separates the concept
of marriage from childbearing. But this argument would also apply to heterosex marriages
involving women who are past menopause or those who have had hysterectomies.
Again we have a hasty generalization (which is the stereotype) and a neglect for variations in individual
circumstances. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that
bans on gay marriage violate the equal protection clause of the 14th
Amendment. In other words, they say that it amounts to discrimination. The
discrimination we see here against LGBT people can be related to discrimination
against women, “children”, and the poor by the common phenomenon we see in all
of these threads – that discrimination tends to be associated with two things –
first, an implicit assumption that the people worthy of discrimination are in
some way inferior, and second, that variations in individual circumstances are
improperly ignored. The latter of these two is of course evidence itself of a
specific subtype of prejudice, because they amount to “judgment before the
fact” – the fact of variations in individuals’ circumstances.
The first of these
two quite obviously relates to “children” even within John Adams’ view
expressed above. The issue of ignoring individual circumstances, that is,
stereotyping, also pertains to young people, though in ways that might be more
subtle. For instance, it is often argued that young people don’t work or aren’t
required to financially support themselves or contribute to the household. But
the same reasoning was behind discrimination against the poor that was
evidently rampant in John Adams’ time. Because they don’t contribute to the
community via tax dollars, they should not vote, which is remarkably parallel
to the argument that “children” should not vote because they don’t support the
household, or indeed, the argument against women voting because they are at
home taking care of children. There is no more reason to accept this argument
for “children” under 21 years of age than there is to accept the argument for women
or the poor. To the point, though, this argument neglects variations in
individual circumstances, for example, some people actually grow businesses and
become wealthy before age 21 or even 18 – resulting in high-profile cases of
parents essentially stealing their millionaire children’s money away, an abuse
of the legal privilege given to them. If the argument is that people should
remain incapable of voting or signing contracts under the age of 18 because
they don’t earn their keep – then what do we say of the millionaire young
entrepreneurs? Again we have neglect of individual circumstances, which is one
of the two big hallmarks of discrimination. Of course one could argue that
these minors have the option of emancipation, but this is a very lengthy, costly
and difficult legal process and in any case in most states is not available to
those under age 16.
Consider also the
case of the divorcee claiming alimony or an adult who is temporarily not
working due to an injury, for example a broken leg. This adult is not acting as
a breadwinner either, so by the financial argument, they should be stripped of
their liberties. Yet again a failure to consider individual circumstances, and
thus a hasty generalization/stereotype. How about orphaned youth or abandoned youth
who are actually, even if only marginally, earning their keep? Neglect of
circumstances yet again. And it is, in virtue of being a stereotype, related to
prejudice against youth. The similarities described here between ageism against
youth on the one hand and sexism, classism, heterosexism, etc. on the other,
are such striking similarities that we should be very suspicious of claims that
ageism against youth is somehow rational while the other prejudices are not.
It is, of course,
impossible for the government to account for everyone’s individual
circumstances. But this is one of the big advantages of freedom of the
individual. For it is only by giving the individual the freedom over his or her
own life that the fullness of the person’s circumstances, and wishes, values,
and desires, may be accounted for and respected. Without individual freedom of
choice, there is no way to account for these factors. This is true for women,
minority races, the poor, the LGBT, and – yes – young people.
References
(contained in text)
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