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The role of biological maturity in behaviors in adolescence which most often are considered as negative by adults was investigated for a normal group of girls. In mid-adolescence early matured girls were found to play truant, smoke hashish, get drunk, pilfer, ignore parents' prohibitions, considerably more often than did late maturing girls. These differences between biological age groups were mediated by the association with older peer groups and they leveled out in late adolescence. Data on alcohol consumption and crime at adult age showed little association with biological maturation. A hypothesis was tested suggesting that early biological maturation may have negative long-term consequences within the education domain. In accord with this assumption, a considerably smaller percentage of girls among the early maturers had a theoretical education above the obligatory nine-year compulsory schooling than among the late maturing girls. The association between biological maturation and adult education was significant also after controlling for standard predictors of education, such as the girls' intelligence and the social status of the home. The requirement of conducting longitudinal studies when investigating issues connected with maturation was strongly emphasized.

Two explanations of intergroup discrimination were investigated-social norm and belief similarity. Subjects were arbitrarily categorized into two groups and informed that ingroup and outgroup members were either similar or dissimilar to themselves on attitudes and beliefs. Then subjects divided rewards between a member of the ingroup and a member of the outgroup. The ingroup was favored in the assignment of rewards across all conditions, indicating that mere categorization is sufficient to produce intergroup discrimination. Ingroup favoritism was further enhanced when the ingroup held similar beliefs to those of the subject, but similarity or dissimilarity of outgroup members did not differentially affect discriminative behavior. Thus, ingroup characteristics may be more important than, outgroup characteristics as a contributor to intergreu-p-behavior."^Subjects did not report ingroup favoritism as the pre-"ferred^ strategy for distributing rewards, as might be expected according to the social norm explanation.

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