Psychologists today recognize childhood as a separate stage of life which can
only be understood in its own terms, and they wonder why the Western world
took so long to see the folly of regarding children simply as small,
inadequately socialized adults. Most psychologists, however, persist in
regarding people 70 to 90 years old as though they were 35 year olds who just
happen to have white hair and extra leisure time. But old age is as
fundamentally different from young adulthood and middle age as childhood is
\(-\) a fact attested to by the organization of modern social and economic life.
Surely it is time, therefore, to acknowledge that serious research into the
unique psychology of advanced age has become indispensable.
Which one of the following principles, if established, would provide the
strongest backing for the argument?
(A) Whenever current psychological practice conflicts with traditional
attitudes toward people, those traditional attitudes should be changed to
bring them in line with current psychological practice.
(B) Whenever two groups of people are so related to each other that any member
of the second group must previously have been a member of the first, people in
the first group should not be regarded simply as deviant members of the second
group.
(C) Whenever most practitioners of a given discipline approach a particular
problem in the same way, that uniformity is good evidence that all similar
problems should also be approached in that way-
(D) Whenever a society's economic life is so organized that two distinct times
of life are treated as being fundamentally different from one another, each
time of life can be understood only in terms of its own distinct psychology.
(E) Whenever psychologists agree that a single psychology is inadequate for
two distinct age groups, they should be prepared to show that there are
greater differences between the two age groups than there are between
individuals in the same age group.
