20/12/2023
(This is a piece I was invited to write for a class discussion. It is 11 min read)
Politics has a unique way of dividing people. We often quibble about candidates, ideology, policy, and strategy. But what about voters? Major elections are coming soon for many countries. At what age should youths be allowed to vote? Should the voting age be lowered to 18, or even 16, as some countries have done?
There are camps in favour of lowering the voting age. They point out that in most countries, it is legal for teens aged 16-18 to do at least some of the following: drink; drive; get married; get an abortion; move abroad; risk their lives / take the lives of others in conscription (incidentally, the basis for the 26th amendment of US Constitution). If teens can legally perform some of these tasks, why can’t they vote to decide their own future? If you can be drafted to fight for your country, why can’t you vote to veto the fight?
Opposing views are equally prominent. Abortions or getting married are largely personal decisions. But voting isn’t. Teens are unlikely to have lived long enough to have experienced the variety of life’s ups and downs. They have not experienced adult pressures of working, familial responsibilities, or owning and paying for property. They likely have not interacted with people in capacities outside of home and school. They might not understand the complexity of politics.
Naturally, there is opposition to the opposition above. While teenagers may be limited in knowledge and flawed in decision-making, so too are many other groups. Almost everyone is susceptible to biases. How many people vote for politicians because of their policies? Most of the time, people can barely remember what policy each candidate stands for. It takes a lot of time and effort to get a good grasp of what political inclinations and policy directions mean. Instead, most voters base their choice on a small number of factors or preferences. They might vote because a politician is better looking or charismatic, feels trustworthy or honest (even if they cannot pinpoint exactly why), or is more representative of their demographic. Or that they have a specific policy that benefits the voter’s profile - but is appealing to a certain profile really for the collective good of the country? In contrast, while teenagers might not have extensive life experience, they tend to be more invested in fact-finding. In the 2016 Brexit vote(picture 2), the younger the profile, the more likely it is for the vote to be "remain". Teenagers led the way to remain in the EU. Are they really less qualified than older voters?
Underpinning these arguments are political considerations. Political parties that do not have the support of youths might oppose the lowering of the voting age. But there are potential costs. 16–18 year-olds will have voting rights in the next election cycle(s), even if they are denied voting now. They might remember which party denied them voting rights earlier and consequently choose to vote against them. Finally, with more countries – e.g. Austria, Argentina, Greece, Brazil, and Indonesia - already adopting teenage voting, there is more pressure on other countries to do likewise.
But beyond broad observations and arguments about behaviour, is there some objective measure of the efficacy of the teenager compared to adults in voting?
Here, we turn to science. First, we know definitively that a teenage brain is fundamentally less mature than an adult brain. This is objective fact. Just as teenage bodies are still physically developing, their brains are neurobiologically developing. 2 major things to note:
A) Picture 3 shows brain development over time. The middle and back of our brains – related to autonomic functions, movements, and emotions develop first and are largely fully functional by our teens. The front of our brains, especially an area called the Pre-Frontal Cortex (the PFC, partly indicated by the rectangle) – related to higher thinking, meaning creation, analytical assessment, and decision making, continues to show areas of green (partial maturity) throughout adolescence. The PFC only fully matures at age 25.
Since the PFC is still developing, other parts of the brain step in to help perform its function, even though they are not quite made for such tasks. One particular region that deputises is the ventral striatum, a region with complex dopamine (dopaminergic) networks. Dopamine affects our sense of anticipation and pleasure. Hence, where a mature brain’s PFC will help to moderate emotions, risk assessment, and delayed gratification, the striatum finds it harder to do the same. This doesn’t mean that teenagers cannot moderate their emotions or reject instant gratification for long-term rewards. They certainly can. But it is more effortful for teens to do so compared to adults.
😎 While some parts of the teenage brain are still developing, other areas are not just fully developed, but firing more intensely than at any other point in our lives. Brain regions regulating emotions are up and running by adolescence, and are boosted by elevated hormones, exaggerating what we feel and how we react.
The combination of a still-developing cortex with emotional and hormonal systems in overdrive happens only once in our lives – during adolescence. And this explains why adolescence is such a unique period, where teens can be inspiring, impulsive, selfish, selfless, revolutionary, reckless, impossible, and yet world-changing.
> Teens seek novelty and have a higher risk tolerance
Novelty seeking and risk tolerance generally peaks during mid-adolescence. This is true not just for humans, but almost all mammals – a mammal is more likely in their teens to leave their tribe or venture into new territory.
The need for novelty is highlighted in Picture 4, research by Vaidya et al from the Universities of Iowa and Stanford. The study examined the amount of dopamine released in children, teenagers, and adults in response to small, medium, or large reward. Dopamine is a measure of the anticipation of pleasure we feel.
For adults, we observe consistency and proportionality. Small rewards – small pleasure; medium reward – medium pleasure; large rewards – large pleasure. Exactly how you imagine it to be.
Children show more erratic results. Easier to excite, even small rewards can trigger high brain activity. However, as the magnitude of the reward increases, pleasure becomes disproportional – medium rewards could trigger the same or more pleasure than large rewards. Why? Because the child is not yet able to make sense of different rewards. This explains why a kid can be more ecstatic playing at the neighbourhood playground than when he/she visits Disneyland.
Teenagers show an even more unexpected pattern. Teens do not even record pleasure when they receive a small reward. Instead, dopamine level drops BELOW the normal baseline rate. In other words, small rewards do not lead to small pleasures. For teenagers, the promise of small rewards leads to disappointment. On the other hand, large rewards lead to a more than proportionate activation. Where an adult is very happy with a large reward, a teenager would be ecstatic. Teens experience exaggerated effects of rewards vs pleasure - the highs are higher and the lows are lower.
> Teenagers are more emotional than other age groups
Why? For adults, when an emotion is triggered, our pre-frontal cortex is correspondingly activated. The PFC considers context and attributes appropriate meaning to our emotions – why are we so happy or angry or sad? Should we feel this way? Sometimes, this means course correction. We might be initially horrified by what someone tells us; then we think it through and realise, ok this is just one side of the story. Ah, we have to moderate for bias.
As we covered, the teenage PFC is not yet matured while the stand-in striatum isn’t completely up for the job. As a result, teens are more likely to experience more exaggerated emotions. Where an adult might be angry, a teenager has a higher likelihood of being furious; where an adult might agree, the teen might be impressed. The obvious caveat is that for experiences that are emotionally stirring – such as elections – adults tend to also struggle with processing how they feel and continued bias. So there seems to be a certain point where most of the population is susceptible to emotionally charged reactions.
> Teenagers are more affected by peer pressure
Teenage inclination to peer pressure, especially those whom they want to accept as friends, is well documented.
Laurence Steinburg from Temple University studied the difference between risk-taking of adolescents and adults in a video driving game. As they are driving in the game, 2 peers were invited to egg them on. The egging on of peers had no effect on adults – they drove in the same way. For teens? Risk-taking tripled.
Neuroimaging reveal what we expect – peers egging subjects on causes the vmPFC to activate more in adults to regulate their actions; in teenagers, the activity in the underdeveloped vmPFC actually is limited, replaced by an increase in striatal activity.
Next, compared to adults, teenage identity is shaped a lot more by what they think peers think of them. Amanda Guyer from the US National Institute of Health asked adults and teens 2 questions: what do you think people think of you as a person? What do you think of yourself as a person? As they answer these questions, their brains are scanned.
For adults, the neurological signals of both answers overlap, but only partially. As expected. Some parts of who you think you are as a person are the same as how others know you. Yet, an adult knows that obviously, no one can completely understand us as a person. For teens? Brain signals are almost identical. As a teenager, what we think of ourselves is what we think others think of us. Peer perception is very influential.
Last, teens are more pained by social exclusion than adults. In an experiment by Naomi Eisenberger of UCLA, adults and teens play a game while in a brain scanner. The game is designed to make participants feel deliberately excluded. Adults were able to rationalise this exclusion – it’s ok, not everyone will like us. Teens, with an incomplete PFC, find it much harder to handle exclusion - it hits them harder and they feel more pain.
>Teenagers are more likely to feel empathy
It turns out that teenagers are more empathetic than adults. I chose the term “empathetic” carefully. Teenagers do not feel for someone in pain. They feel AS someone in pain, and they feel this with greater intensity. The reason for this goes back to our fundamentals – a fully formed emotional brain on hormonal steroids, and an incomplete frontal cortex.
The effects of greater empathy are hard to pin down. On one hand, some teenagers are more willing than adults to help others because they understand and feel their pain. There is also an element of egoism. A teen is much more likely than an adult, having not faced as much failure in life, to believe they can change the world. On the other hand, sometimes this empathetic pain is so much that teenagers may choose to escape from it completely. There tends to be less middle ground.
> Crucial caveats
So, in our teenage years, our analytical frontal cortex is still developing. At the same time, teens have an overactive emotional system, boosted by an especially high output of hormones. As a result, compared to adults, teenagers are more emotional, crave novelty, have higher risk tolerance, are more empathetic, and are more deeply influenced by peers.
Ok, so case closed, right? The evidence seems to support that teenagers are not as ready as adults for voting. Indeed, some folks are already taking the most prominent figure – 25 – as the basis to establish voting age.
This is a convenient view. But it is a flawed one.
First, none of these inclinations are objectively bad. What could be seen as novelty seeking could also signal an open-mindedness; in contrast, adult voters might be close-minded – some adult voters have aligned themselves with one political party, and will vote for whoever the party nominates, never considering any other candidate. Similarly, being more emotional and empathetic, teens are less likely to just consider just their own specific profile (what can the government do for people in my age group with my social status), and more likely to consider how other groups in society will be affected, especially disadvantaged groups. Perhaps teenagers might be drawn to a certain profile of candidates. But this is true for almost every other voter.
Second and more crucially, nuance and context matter.
It is immediately obvious that a 12-year-old teenager and an 18-year-old teenager are very different people. We discussed that the pre-frontal cortex only fully develops at age 25. But we do not suddenly wake up on our 25th birthday a different person from the night before. To go back to our analogy on physical development, we can continue physical growth until our early 20s. But for most people, most of our physical development is complete by the time we are 16-18. In other words, we do not need full development, just sufficient development.
So, what is this age of sufficient mental development? At which age are teenagers able to rationalise and regulate emotions to a similar extent as adults? As expected, this is nuanced and complex. Here we can draw on examples beyond voting. We turn to the courts, on a case quite literally about life and death.
The 2005 U.S. Supreme Court Case of Roper vs. Simmons (picture 5) examined the culpability of 17-year-old Christopher Simmons - convicted of murdering a woman during a robbery. Simmons was sentenced to death for his crime. Simmons’ defense team argued that while he did not have a specific, diagnosable brain condition, his still-developing adolescent brain made him less culpable for his crime and therefore not subject to the death penalty. Amicus briefs were filed by, among others, the American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) summarising the existing neuroscience evidence and suggesting that adolescents’ still-developing brains made them fundamentally different from adults in terms of culpability. The defense team’s argument triumphed.
Today, Simmons lives and lives a free life. No teen has been executed in the United States since.
But the Supreme Court’s ruling has its critics. Several Justices have openly criticised the ruling. Most notably, Justice Antonin Scalia reflected on a 1990 brief filed by the APA in support of adolescents’ right to seek an abortion without parental consent (Hodgson v. Minnesota). In this case, the APA argued that adolescent decision-making was virtually indistinguishable from adult decision-making by the age of 14 or 15.
Scalia points out the inconsistency: “[The APA] claims in Roper vs Simmons that scientific evidence shows persons under 18 lack the ability to take moral responsibility for their decisions; however [the APA] has previously taken precisely the opposite position before this very Court. Given the nuances of scientific methodology and conflicting views, courts—which can only consider the limited evidence on the record before them, are ill-equipped to determine which view of science is the right one”
Thus, in Roper, APA argued that science showed that adolescents were not as mature as adults, whereas in Hodgson, it was argued that science showed that they were. Which is right?
One can understand Justice Scalia’s opposition, especially as he was personally involved in both cases. It appears that Scalia has found a contradiction.
Except he misses a critical point, a point we had raised earlier: CONTEXT.
The state of the adolescent offender, even in the case of a murder that is as brutal as Roper, is more likely to be rash, impulsive, and in the presence of perceived peer pressure or in pursuit of perceived peer approval. In contrast, abortions are a longer, drawn-out process. Mothers wanting to go through an abortion will have to navigate interaction with hospital staff (non-family; non-peers) and go through tests and information sessions. While peer and/or familial pressure still exists, these are moderated by the views of professionals. Next, the abortion process cannot be done immediately, instead dragging across several sessions over some time. Subsequent appointments have to be scheduled, and consent forms filled. Impulse is greatly reduced, and there are various points where one can change her mind (either way).
In other words, committing a crime is what psychologists term a “hot” condition – where we make a decision while emotionally agitated, influenced by peer pressure, and under time constraints. Conversely, a “cold” condition is when people have time to gather information, think through the different choices, information, think through what different choices offer, and make a decision without significant peer pressure.
The difference between “hot” and “cold” conditions is significant. When it comes to logical reasoning abilities in structured situations, and the processing of information, most tests find no appreciable differences between teenagers aged 16 vs older adults. Teens are just as likely as adults to gather and process information, reason logically, and then come to a decision. We mentioned the case of Hooper, on teenage abortion rights. Studies like Henshaw & Kost show that about half of all pregnant 16-year-olds contemplating an abortion would go beyond medical staff and their parents to seek advice from another adult (e.g. a teacher, a counsellor, a friend, an older relative), the same proportion as adults.
However, where teenagers struggle is when decisions or actions are made under “hot conditions”. As we have shared, due to brain development and hyperactive hormones, teenagers tend to find it more challenging to rationalise emotions, control impulses, and regulate peer pressure.
Can hot/cold cognition categorisation inform voting age?
Several groups of scientists, including those from the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice, say yes. They argue that voting is a form of cold cognition – there is a period from nomination day to actual voting, hence there is no immediate time duress. Over this campaigning period, more information about all candidates, and the reactions of different groups become available, diluting peer pressure.
Yet, think back on the elections that you have voted in. For people who are invested in the process, emotions run high. Inevitably, campaigning deviates from rational discussions on policy and ideology. These areas draw far less attention compared to controversies, character assessment and past history, mutual attacks between candidates, and advertising. Some voters might closely associate themselves with a candidate, seeing him/her as a hero/heroine here to save the country. Conversely, there could be deep hatred for certain candidates, believing that the country will go into ruin if they take office. Further, elections are also polarising, particularly with social media algorithms. Different groups of people with opposing views band together creating formidable echo chambers, creating significant peer pressure and confirmation bias.
So we have arguments in support and in opposition to teenage voting.
It is evident why there isn’t a straightforward answer.
Voting is a question of values with no definitive line of right and wrong. We have learned that teenagers are flawed voters. But every voter is flawed in some way or another, prone to bias, selfishness, and information gaps. To what level of flaw is each society comfortable with? Can a society accept that teenagers are more likely to be attracted by a certain profile of candidates and more than proportionately influenced by political trends? If your answer is no, well then, can you accept an older voter in cognitive decline, a voter who has just gone through a period of tremendous instability (say a divorce, a family death, jail, or mental illness), or a voter that will always vote for only one political party?
While the eventual decision on voting age is a matter of values, the objective facts that science provides, independent of personal opinion or legacy, help to inform our decision. However, science and public policy are struggling to keep up with each other. Scientists have often been uninvolved in policy-making, neglecting their role in not just explaining what they have found out, but how this applies to everyday scenarios. If scientists do not explain the science, scientific findings would be left to lay interpretations of people with professions in other areas, like policymakers and lawyers. The result is the example of Justice Scalia, who was left understandably perplexed.
It is also important to note that while science has made great leaps in the finer understanding of how our brain works, it is tremendously complex and there is much more work to be done. For example, even if we accept “hot” and “cold” cognition to be an appropriate categorisation, our current understanding of “hot” and “cold” cognition is limited to straightforward tasks in experimental settings. We are far less sure of the divide between “hot” and “cold” in more complex settings. However, the appropriate action is not to abstain from policy decisions until science is fully ready. Instead, science has the responsibility to provide an explanation of what is objective facts that we know of now, and what we are still unsure about.
Finally, our understanding of the science of teenage brains helps us to improve our answers to other values-based discussions, and if there are significant inconsistencies. Should smoking, drinking, voting, aborting, and marriage be legal at 16,18 or 21? Is the age limit consistently applied across these different actions?
