Self-esteem, Self-compassion and The Personal Fable
Elkind’s work on egocentrism was in a sense an expansion and further development of Piagetian theories on the subject. Egocentrism as Piaget describes it “generally refers to a lack of differentiation in some area of subject-object interaction”. Both Piaget and Elkind recognize that egocentrism applies to all developmental stages from infancy to childhood, to adolescence to adulthood and beyond. However at each developmental stage, egocentrism manifests its characteristics in different ways, depending on the end goals of that particular stage.
During adolescence, formal operations are developing and become more intact and present in thinking processes. According to Piaget, these formal operations allow for “the young person to construct all the possibilities in a system and construct contrary-to-fact propositions”. Elkind adds that “they also enable to conceptualize his own thought, to take his mental constructions as objects and reason about them". These new thinking processes are believed to begin in early adolescences around ages 11–12. Another characteristic of formal operations that directly applies to adolescence egocentrism is the matter that during this stage, as discussed above, adolescents are conceptualizing the thoughts of those around them, in a sense, putting themselves into someone else’s shoes in order to possibly understand their views. However, since adolescence is a stage in which the youth is primarily concerned with themselves and their own personal views and feelings, these shortfalls of formal operations result in the adolescent “fail to differentiate between what others are thinking about and his own mental preoccupations, he assumes that other people are as obsessed with his behavior and appearance as he is himself". As mentioned earlier, these sentiments are the basis of another feature of adolescent egocentrism: the imaginary audience.
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