egocentrism

egocentrism, in psychology, the cognitive shortcomings that underlie the failure, in both children and adults, to recognize the idiosyncratic nature of one’s knowledge or the subjective nature of one’s perceptions. Such failures describe children at play who cover their eyes and joyfully exclaim to their parents, “You can’t see me!” Likewise, they describe adult physicians who provide their patients with medical diagnoses that only another doctor could understand.

The Swiss psychologist and biologist Jean Piaget pioneered the scientific study of egocentrism. He traced the development of cognition in children as they move out of a state of extreme egocentrism and come to recognize that other people (and other minds) have separate perspectives. Within the framework of Piaget’s stage-based theory of cognitive development, the infant in the sensorimotor stage is extremely egocentric. During the first two years of development, infants are unaware that alternative perceptual, affective, and conceptual perspectives exist. Once they reach the preoperational stage (two to seven years), children come to recognize the existence of alternative perspectives but usually fail to adopt those viewpoints when necessary. Using a variety of ingenious tasks, Piaget discovered that children in the preoperational stage often do not recognize that another person who is looking at the same nonuniform object as they are, but from a different angle, sees the object differently. Piaget’s observation that older children stop displaying such instantiations of egocentrism led him to argue that children overcome egocentrism when they reach the concrete-operational stage and come to appreciate that different perspectives afford different perceptions. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development posits that by age seven most people are free of egocentrism.

Since Piaget, research within developmental psychology on children’s theory of mind (their understanding of the mental lives of others) has continued to explore egocentrism in many areas of social and cognitive reasoning, such as perception, communication, and moral judgment. Such research has generally maintained its focus on young children’s instantiations of egocentrism and the developmental stages at which these are overcome.

Another important tradition in psychology that has also advanced the understanding of egocentrism—though largely in isolation from the theory-of-mind tradition in developmental psychology—is the heuristics and biases tradition in cognitive and social psychology. Research on heuristics and biases that affect human judgment has demonstrated that, even well into adulthood, people’s perceptions are characterized by various egocentric shortcomings. They include the false-consensus effect, whereby people tend to overestimate the extent to which their own preferences are shared by others; the curse-of-knowledge effect, whereby experts in a particular domain fail to adequately take into account the level of knowledge of laypeople with whom they are communicating; the illusion of transparency, whereby people tend to exaggerate the degree to which their internal emotional states (such as anxiety during public speaking) are evident to outside observers; and the spotlight effect, whereby people tend to overestimate the degree to which aspects of their appearance and actions are noticed by others.

Although egocentric biases are generally more subtle in adulthood than in infancy, the persistence of some forms of egocentrism in adulthood suggests that overcoming egocentrism may be a lifelong process that never fully reaches fruition.