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[Luke_Prowler]

Maturity is one of those subjective things, like intelegence and beauty. If there is a difference between the male and female maturity development, then I never saw it when I was in school.

[Il Palazzo]

Alright, first you'll have to qualify what type of brain development. Someone with a brain disability will generally exhibit more child-like behavior; I'm not disagreeing with that (even then you'll have to say what disability; someone with autism isn't inherently less mature than someone without). Secondly, you'll have to prove that it actually does correlate to your personal definition of "maturity."



The thing about "brain development" is really, it can mean whatever the hell you want it to mean. People bring it up a lot expecting it to somehow give weight to their argument.


Want a bullshit assumption about brain development? Ok, here goes: Girls brains stop developing at an earlier age, while men's continue to develop past that.  That means they're smarter and more mature!

I think we can all agree that's a bullshit argument. There's nothing there proving A) that men's brains develop more, or B) that development correlates to maturity. Yet people make arguments using the exact same line of thinking and expect it to carry weight. You cant' just say "brain's more developed!" and automatically assume it correlates to (much less causes) what you want it to.


EDIT: I get this sort of argument a lot when dealing with people who think kids are sub-human and deserving of prejudice, so apologies if I'm rather venomous about it.

See, now you're just clouding it needlessly.

It's the type of development we're talking about - the adolescent development. I really didn't think there was a need to clarify that.
It can't mean anything, as it's a very well researched area of psychology. The changes a human mind undergoes between puberty and adulthood are defined and easy to observe.

This development period takes a child and produces an adult both biologically and psychologically, which should imply maturity.
So it's not some random bullshit assumption I'm making here when I say that a person hitting this  period earlier is going to become mature earlier than a latecomer.

The details are not important. What additional variables we can introduce, or what we exactly mean by maturity - as long as we identify this quality as being a part of being an adult, then it follows logically that the time of the beginning of a process leading to adulthood will weigh on how mature people are at a given age.

As for the edit - you can't be going into the other extreme either, ignoring the fact that kids are still growing and developing(it's what means to be a child after all).

[GlyphGryph]

It can't mean anything, as it's a very well researched area of psychology. The changes a human mind undergoes between puberty and adulthood are defined and easy to observe.

Do recall that most psychology is done on a remarkable small and non-representative group of people. Like Newton's laws of gravity, the results only really hold if you don't go too in depth, and you make sure not to go outside the context the research was conducted in. Very very little of can be used to make anything approaching broad sweeps of understanding of human development. Rather, its human development (under these cultural conditions) (among this subset of society) (for our sample group).

This development period takes a child and produces an adult both biologically and psychologically, which should imply maturity.

There's not really been much evidence that brain development produces maturity. Maturity is, as commonly defined, a type of behaviour, and while brain development can make behaviours easier or harder to learn, it very rarely impacts behaviour that directly. If girls are more "mature" than boys at a certain age, brain development may play a role but its but no means guaranteed to be the dominant one.

As for the edit - you can't be going into the other extreme either, ignoring the fact that kids are still growing and developing(it's what means to be a child after all).

So people are children well into old age then? We are talking psychologically, right?

The details are not important. What additional variables we can introduce, or what we exactly mean by maturity - as long as we identify this quality as being a part of being an adult, then it follows logically that the time of the beginning of a process leading to adulthood will weigh on how mature people are at a given age.

But most people identify maturity is something that adults tend to have rather than being intrinsic of adulthood. Oddly enough, there are quite a few experiences that come along with adolescence that might play a major role as well, without being directly tied to anything biological. If it was only brain development, then ALL adults would be quite mature and no children would be - obviously not the case.

Of course, we might be operating under different definitions of maturity - there is more than one, after all. But since the details of "what exactly we mean by maturity" are unimportant to you, I suppose thats a moot point.

[Il Palazzo]

That's completely missing the point I was trying to make.

There's not really been much evidence that brain development produces maturity. Maturity is, as commonly defined, a type of behaviour, and while brain development can make behaviours easier or harder to learn, it very rarely impacts behaviour that directly. If girls are more "mature" than boys at a certain age, brain development may play a role but its but no means guaranteed to be the dominant one.

It's not important here whether or not it's the dominant one(and I wasn't saying it is).
What is imprtant, is that it's the only variable in the whole process that can't be equally applied to boys and girls of the same age.
So it stands to reason that it's the one producing differences in behaviour in the two groups, unless you can think of something else.

But most people identify maturity is something that adults tend to have rather than being intrinsic of adulthood. Oddly enough, there are quite a few experiences that come along with adolescence that might play a major role as well, without being directly tied to anything biological. If it was only brain development, then ALL adults would be quite mature and no children would be - obviously not the case.

Those experiences you speak of are part of the development process, I think you can agree with that. Now, if somebody encounters such experiences a couple years earlier, then should't they be also more mature?

As for the edit - you can't be going into the other extreme either, ignoring the fact that kids are still growing and developing(it's what means to be a child after all).

So people are children well into old age then? We are talking psychologically, right?

You know very well what I meant there and are just picking on straws. I'd appreciate if you wouldn't do that.

And did you just call psychology a bogus science?

[Darvi]

Are you saying it isn't?

[RedKing]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

IT IS! IT IS! IT IS! IM NOT CRAZY, IM A LEVEL 4 OPERATING THETAN!

[Il Palazzo]

Are you saying it isn't?

Obviously. I certainly wouldn't put it on par with physics or biology, but it's rather ignorant to think that there can be nothing learned about human behaviour in general by analysing small groups of people. That would assume lack of the ability to control for additional factors in an experiment or inadequacy of statistical methods.

pseudoninjaedit: technically it's psychiatrists who are servants of Xenu, but I suppose one can at least suspect some dark cooperation between the two.

[Andir]

And did you just call psychology a bogus science?

I'm pretty sure that was not said.  The notion I read was that psychology tends to focus on edge cases... people who are considered not normal.  It's not said that the entire focus is on those cases, but a majority is.

I had to pick this out because it feels a bit ad hominem to me.

[Il Palazzo]

Eh, you're right. That does sound rather offensive, and I appologise for it.

What I was trying to say there is that GlyphGryph apparently arbitrarily discarded the rather large part of psychology that concerns human behaviour in general, like the developmental psychology for example. To say that seems to me condescending, for the reasons stated in my previous post.

[G-Flex]

And did you just call psychology a bogus science?

I'm pretty sure that was not said.  The notion I read was that psychology tends to focus on edge cases... people who are considered not normal.  It's not said that the entire focus is on those cases, but a majority is.

I had to pick this out because it feels a bit ad hominem to me.

I'm... not sure that point is even true. Plenty of psychological research and studies are done on the population at large, or specific subsets of it. It's not 1920 anymore.

[scriver]

And then there's the inherent racism in white people posing as blacks.

Forgoing the current discussion, why would you say white people dressing up as black is inherently racist, Virex? I can't see how there would be any inherent racism there, just as there is no inherent sexism in dressing up as the opposite gender, or class elitism in poor people appearing as rich (or vise versa). Any possible bigotry comes from how said "race"/gender/class is portrayed and the motives behind the dressup.

[RedKing]

And then there's the inherent racism in white people posing as blacks.

Forgoing the current discussion, why would you say white people dressing up as black is inherently racist, Virex? I can't see how there would be any inherent racism there, just as there is no inherent sexism in dressing up as the opposite gender, or class elitism in poor people appearing as rich (or vise versa). Any possible bigotry comes from how said "race"/gender/class is portrayed and the motives behind the dressup.

In a vacuum, yes. But there's a certain history there that isn't present with those other examples.

[scriver]

I know the history (TvTropes yay!), but it was said "inherently", not "in light of cultural and relationship-ial history". I just want to hear if Virex really believes that, and if so, why.

[ChairmanPoo]

And then there's the inherent racism in white people posing as blacks.

Forgoing the current discussion, why would you say white people dressing up as black is inherently racist, Virex? I can't see how there would be any inherent racism there, just as there is no inherent sexism in dressing up as the opposite gender, or class elitism in poor people appearing as rich (or vise versa). Any possible bigotry comes from how said "race"/gender/class is portrayed and the motives behind the dressup.

In a vacuum, yes. But there's a certain history there that isn't present with those other examples.

In the US. Not necessarily elsewhere.

[GlyphGryph]

I didn't call psychology bogus. But like any science, context is critical, and there are a lot more loose variables in psychology that make generalizations hard. For example, psychology researchers have had a long tendency of doing studies on caucasion 1st world college students immersed in a particular culture and exposed to similar environmental variables, and then extrapolating those results to apply to the world population, only to later discover that their findings only hold true within the context they were initially studied under for those that were initially studied.

Psychology isn't bogus, its just really really hard, for lots of very good reasons, to get generalized results. It is NOT bogus, and it certainly isn't worthless, but its important to understand its limitations.

My only point here, really, was that the difference in brain /development/, as in physical structures, does not necessarily indicate increased maturity, though there may be a correlation, and the correlation between gender and brain development may well be a result of environmental differences rather than any inherent difference between the sexes - environment has a large impact in brain development, after all. And that, at best, you are working with a statistical tool, and there may well exist multiple valid subsets where the conditions do no hold, simply because of normal variation, especially since culture clearly plays a role, and culture obviously varies.