[pacaro]

This may be a "get off my lawn" comment, but my understanding is that pediatric psychiatrists and psychologists will treat patients up to 25 years old. The boundary between childhood and adulthood is labile and varies from person to person. From my own experience, re-reading books like "100 years of solitude" or "the unbearable lightness of being" at ten year intervals shows me how much I have changed

[tedks]

...but the optic nerve of a 20 year old is the same from a scientific perspective in almost all respects to the optic nerve of a 30 year old. Maybe if that optic nerve signaled some horribly deep work of literature like 100 years of solitude, the older brain behind it would interpret it differently, but that nerve is the same.

When you remember the amazing swelling feelings of being ~adult~ you had when you last read 100 years of solitude, your semantic and episodic memory systems are, functionally, identical to what they were when you read it the first time. Maybe your fluid intelligence is a little less fluid, but that doesn't really start until you've aged a lot.

I'm sure you've changed as a person. I'm sure you have a wealth of new experiences and are entirely different from your past self. This is irrelevant to the physics, chemistry, and psychology of your body.

[pacaro]

In general I agree with you. It is important to separate experience from capability (there's probably a better word here).

Much of the social psychology may not fit easily into that division though. To pick on a common whipping boy in these arguments, Milgram's obedience study, what is the role of experience in any set of choices like those given to the participants. The asymmetric responsibilities when there is a power dynamic is something that some people learn somewhere along the line.

I'm rambling a little but I feel that some of the observed effects in these experiments may be things for which experience may provide a learned immunity

[tedks]

Milgram's obedience study was tested on adult men, between ages 30-40 IIRC. There were 19 later experiments, you wouldn't call them replications because they weren't exactly the same, but they were all consistent, and they sampled diverse (for the 50's) populations.

If you didn't know that, and were assuming it was tested on undergrads exclusively, you should recognize that your assumption was wrong, and propagate that through your belief graph.

[DanBC]

I agree that human brains co tinue to develop through the 20s.

In the UK CAMHS or CYPS (Child and adolescant mental health services or children and youn people services) have a hard cutoff at 18.

Someone who is 17 years 11 months old will be placed into a CYPS team and a CYPS in patient unit if needed, and someone who is 18 years and 1 day old will go to an adult team and adult inpatient units.

There are considerble problems at the moment with:

Transitioning from CYPS to adult services

Having enough inpatient beds for young people.

Young people either have to travel hundreds of miles to get a bed or they have to go into an adult unit. That's a serious breach of commissioning and regulators get involved.