Authority

Authority Relationships Over the Lifespan

Throughout their lifetimes, people enter into authority relationships with various actors. In childhood, such relationships are formed with parents, family members, peer groups, teachers, or other authority figures. Children accept the legitimacy of both peer and adult authority. They give priority to adult over peer authority and to peer authority over lack of parental authority.

As children enter adolescence, parental authority over moral issues, such as stealing, sharing communal property, or lying, is retained, whereas parent authority declines or is contested in personal and conventional domains of life such as style of dress, attendance at social events, or choice of friends. When legitimacy of parental authority over various issues decreases, children and adolescents perceive decisions to be subject to their personal choice, which they justify with notions such as fairness, politeness, social coordination, customs, or responsibility. Over time in early adulthood, the perceived legitimacy of parental authority decreases and the salience of the peer group increases. By midlife, individuals often ascend to positions of authority at home, work, or in spheres where they have accumulated expertise.

In childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, people submit to expert authority and accept knowledge of experts—for example, doctors, lawyers, or financial analysts—to guide their personal actions. Legitimacy of expert or professional authority arises from the differences between a layperson’s and an expert’s knowledge on specific issues. [Page 192]A layperson has conventional, basic knowledge and beliefs, whereas experts on a given topic have acquired deep knowledge through specialized training. Such training usually equips experts in methods through which they can verify evidence about beliefs and thus increase certainty with which they perceive facts.

In late life, deterioration of physical or mental health may lead to an individual’s reduced autonomy and result in ceding authority over decisions about one’s medical interventions and valued life activities to the closest family members and physicians. In end-of-life care, decision-making authority can be granted both to physicians because of their technical expertise and to family members, such as the spouse or children, because of their concerns for the patient’s interests and knowledge about the patient’s values and preferences.

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