Psychologists today recognize childhood as a separate stage of life wh

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.