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Egocentrism redux
DEVELOPMENTAL
REVIEW
5,
218-226 (1985)
Egocentrism DAVID
Redux
ELKIND
Tufts University
This commentary addresses itself to D. K. Lapsley and M. N. Murphy’s critique (1985, Developmental Review, 5, 201-217) of my theory of egocentrism (D. Elkind, 1967, Child Development, 38, 1025-1034). These authors argue that the theory of egocentrism is inconsistent, that self-other differentiation occurs earlier than the theory suggests, and that self-consciousness does not require egocentrism. They conclude that perspective taking provides a more consistent and clear explanation of the adolescent phenomena of the imaginary audience and the personal fable than does egocentricism. I disagree and counter their arguments with my own. 6 1985 Academic Press, 1~.
It is both gratifying and disturbing to read a critique of a piece of work that was done almost 20 years earlier. The gratification comes from the fact that the concepts presented in that paper were not forgotten but rather have gained some currency in the literature of psychology and the health professions. On the other hand, the disturbance comes from the recognition that the acceptance of the ideas presented in that early paper has been far from total, and that maybe some of the criticisms are entirely warranted. But I consider such a disturbance a healthy one. Ideas and concepts which are not reflected upon and challenged and modified are not truly scientific; they become dogma-a different realm entirely. So I welcome this critique by Lapsley and Murphy (1985) of my paper on adolescent egocentrism (Elkind, 1967a). It is a thoughtful, genteel critique which raises some important issues in the field of social cognition. In my response I want to react to these more general issues as well as the particular points of their paper. A TOUCH OF HISTORY
Inasmuch as the egocentrism paper has been widely reprinted and cited, a few words about its origination might be of interest. I wrote the paper when I returned to the United States after spending a year with Piaget in Geneva. Up until that time, I had been engaged in replicating Piaget’s studies using traditional sampling, experimental, and quantitative techniques. I should confess, perhaps, that I began those studies in a highly skeptical frame of mind. It was obvious to me that Piaget’s findings would not stand the test of experimental rigor. When my data replicated Reprint requests should be addressed to the Lincoln Filene Center, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155. 218 0273-2297185$3.OO Copyright All rights
8 1985 by Academic Press, Inc. of reproduction in any form reserved.
EGOCENTRISM
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ADOLESCENCE
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his, and the statistical tests confirmed his stages, I had a change of heart. I became, to all extents and purposes, a Piagetian. But I was also trained as a clinician and have always continued my clinical work even while carrying an academic appointment. I do the same today. At the time the paper was written, I was teaching at the University of Denver and directing the Child Study Center (a mental health clinic) run by the University. I was also working as a psychologist for the family court in Arapahoe County. It was my work with delinquent teenagers that was the impetus both for the egocentrism paper and also for a paper on middle-class delinquency (Elkind, 1967b) in which I first suggested the contract theory of socialization that is detailed in a more recent work (Elkind, 1981). I have introduced this historical information for a couple of reasons. First, Lapsley and Murphy (1985) seem to associate me with a strict (cold) cognitive position or as a kind of hard-line Piagetian. That is far from the truth. Even while in Geneva, in a study on illusory transformations (Elkind, 1966) I challenged the traditional interpretation of Piaget’s conservation task. It seemed to me then, and still does, that the conservation task measures two kinds of conservation, identity and equivalence (Elkind & Schoenfeld, 1972). Put differently, I argued that between the stage of object conservation and the stage of quantity conservation there is a stage of quality conservation (forms, colors, etc.). In the conservation papers, as in the egocentrism paper and the delinquency paper, I was stepping outside of the limits of subject matter areas Piaget had set for himself. I had done the same in my earlier studies of religious identity (Elkind, 1961b, 1962b, 1963). Fortunately, Piaget was not Freud. He did not in any way reject or isolate me for pursuing my own interests and problems. We remained on warm and friendly terms until his death. His way of handling my neoPiagetian work was simply not to acknowledge it. Piaget was very focused, and he simply did not concern himself with work outside the problems he was dealing with at the moment. I would be dishonest if I did not admit that his ignoring my work hurt a bit. For example, he would not write a preface to any of my books, in part I believe, because the contents were not strictly Piagetian. At the time, and even now, I thought I was “heating up” the cold cognition by nuzzling it up to a little clinical warmth. And I have continued in my work to try to build bridges between cognitive development and clinical and social issues (e.g., Elkind, 1973, 1982, 1985). So, whatever else it was, the egocentrism paper was not an exercise in Piaget stamped cold cognition. Quite the contrary, by publishing it and other papers I put myself at risk with regard to my standing in the Piagetian camp. Interestingly enough, some of the orthodox Piagetians had more trouble with these papers than did Piaget.
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I bring in this historical material for still another reason. It is very natural and understandable for a fresh generation of researchers to identify with a new discipline which did not exist before their time. Nevertheless, while social cognition may be a new term, it conceals an old fact. As I understand it, social cognition has to do with the conceptualization of self, others, social roles, relations, and institutions. It also seems to include the influence of social forces on development. The early studies of Hartshorne and May (1928) on moral judgment and moral behavior were studies in social cognition as was Piaget’s work on the same subject (Piaget, 1932). Likewise, theories such as those of Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) and Erik H. Erikson (1950) dealt with social cognition. How else could one classify Sullivan’s concept of “chumships” and Erikson’s concepts of “identity,” “intimacy,” and “generativity.” Lapsley and Murphy not only ignore the prehistory of social cognition, they also seem to narrow its scope and to identify it with work on perspective taking. But perspective taking is but one of many theories of socialization; it does not define the field of social cognition. For example, work on attribution theory (Kelley, 1971), on person perception (Heider, 1958), on scripts (Nelson, 1981) and frames (Goffman, 1974)are all studies in social cognition. Social cognition as a discipline is in no way coextensive with perspective taking. As a matter of fact, perspective taking is not even a very good model of socialization. The perspective-taking literature derives from the Piagetian three-mountain task (Piaget & Inhelder, 1967) whch had to do with spatial, not social, perspective taking. To extend it to the social domain ignored a fundamental Piagetian tenet; namely, do not extend cognitive concepts to other levels of analysis but rather take concepts from other disciplines and levels of observation and reinterpret them from a cognitive developmental perspective. Extending cognitive concepts to new levels of phenomena, Piaget realized, is essentially reductionistic. As a general model of socialization, role taking does not work and for quite self-evident reasons. Most of our social interactions are of the surface variety. Surface interactions are encounters with strangers whom we may never see again. Buying a newspaper, handing an usher a ticket, eating in a strange restaurant, and so on, are all surface encounters. Such encounters are regulated by implicit rules, expectancies, and understandings that Erving Goffman (1974) called “frames.” In our day-to-day surfce interactions we never bother to take the other person’s point of view because it is unnecessary. Deep social interactions are those we have with people to whom we are attached, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our wives and husbands, our children, other relatives, and close friends. Even in deep social interactions, however, perspective taking is far from routine. Indeed, as a clinician, I would say that the inability of husbands and wives or parents
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and children to see the other person’s point of view, or to credit it with any validity, is a leading cause of marital and child mental health problems. If perspective taking was the fundamental process of socialization, why should people find it so hard to take another person’s point of view? Why is it so hard to follow the golden rule, a perspective-taking admonition? It is certainly true, of course, that perspective taking does evolve with age and that our capacity to understand others who are in different emotional and motivational states than ourselves improves with age. But we all have many capacities that we do not use because they are too effortful. In buying a new car, to illustrate, we may have hundreds of choices which provide an opportunity for formal operational thinking. But most of us find something we like on the lot or in the showroom that comes close to what we want. We really do not want to go to all the trouble of choosing colors, fabrics, engine options, etc., etc., etc. And certainly in international politics, the real problems derive from each country’s unwillingness to take the other country’s point of view, or to credit it with any validity. Tourists who demand that everything in a foreign country operate as they do at home are still another example of how failure to take others’ perspectives is much more common than the reverse. In short, if one reflects upon everyday life, it is difficult to credit perspective, or role taking, with a central part in social interactions. Perspective taking is not needed at surface level interactions and is uncommon at deep level interactions. Given these considerations, perspective taking could hardly be the main engine of socialization or the heart of social cognition. In many ways, social perspective taking is like formal operational thinking; it is a capacity which we possess but which we only use in very special circumstances. With these general considerations out of the way we can turn to the specific objections to the egocentrism paper. INCONSISTENCY
Lapsley and Murphy (1985) argue first that “the account of the passage out of adolescent egocentrism is theoretically inconsistent with the transition rules established for prior variants of cognitive egocentrism.” It is certainly true that for early levels of egocentrism I have argued that they are overcome primarily by the attainment of new, higher level mental abilities. It is also true that for adolescent egocentrism I suggest that social interaction is the primary mechanism for getting teenagers to modify their imaginary audience and personal fable constructions. This switch is indeed inconsistent. But so too is growth and development. Children grow and then stop growing, intelligence peaks and then declines with age, as does physical
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vigor. Nature itself is inconsistent as even the physicists have discovered. The wave and particle theories of light are inconsistent but both work and both are necessary. A theory which is self-consistent but which does not deal with the phenomena it seeks to explain demonstrates a rather worthless consistency. There are a number of inconsistencies in the phenomena of cognitive development. Sex differences on Piagetian tasks, to illustrate, do not appear until adolescence (Elkind, 1961a, 1962a). Likewise, while most children acquire the fundamental conservation concepts of number, length, mass, and so on, some formal operational concepts such as volume conservation do not seem to be universally acquired. Any theory of development which does not take these factual inconsistencies into account would not be a very useful or a very valid hypothesis or theory. In adolescence, new levels of social interaction play the role of new mental abilities in moving young people out of their egocentric position. That may be inconsistent, but it is in keeping with the facts. SELF-OTHER
DIFFERENTIATION
A second objection to the adolescent egocentrism concept is the fact that even “Level 1 children can, not only clearly differentiate the subjectivity of self and other, but can infer with great accuracy the thoughts of the other.” The problem here is the immediate casting of the issue in perspective-taking terms. Certainly children of school age can take another person’s perspective when it is different from their own. This was quite clear in my replication (Elkind, 1961~) of Piaget’s studies of children’s conceptions of right and left. But this is far different from saying that children can infer “with great accuracy the thoughts of the other.” Even adults who know each other quite well have difficulty doing that. Selman’s studies (1980) deal with situational dilemmas which give children pretty good clues to the other person’s feeling state. Recognizing how a friend might feel if he or she lost a puppy is a relatively low-level inference and is more concerned with feeling than with thought. Consider, in contrast, a teenager who is standing in front of a mirror combing his or her hair and imagining how admiring the peer group will be. First of all, the audience itself is already a mental construction, not a factual dilemma. The teenager fails to distinguish between the concerns of the audience and the concerns of the self, because the audience is a personal construction not an external reality. The main point about the imaginary audience is the fact that it is imaginary, not real. What young adolescents can do, and what children cannot do, is create such audiences in their head. Where the young adolescent has difficulty is in recognizing the subjectivity of his or her own mental constructions. The young teenager has trouble in differentiating between
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the concerns of others he or she has created and conerns which are properly his or her own. So, the fact that children can infer the thoughts or feelings of other given the situational context, does not really speak to the issue of the imaginary audience, which is mental construction and not a social reality. Perhaps I did not make this point sufficiently clear in the original article. But when I spoke of the adolescent not being able to distinguish between the thoughts of others and his or her own, I was speaking about a mental representation of others whom they themselves had created and that were already a mental construction. The difference is not unlike that between a letter as a verbal symbol representing a concrete sound and a letter as an algebraic symbol representing another symbol, namely, a number. Put differently, a child reconstructs the thought of an existing person or persons. But an adolescent reconstructs the thought of a person or persons whom they themselves have created or constructed. The imaginary audience is a second-order, not a first-order symbolic construction. EGOCENTRISM
AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
According to Lapsley and Murphy (1985), One can dispense with the concept of egocentrism altogether, since it plays no meaningful explanatory role. If the crux of the imaginary audience construct is self-consciousness, the presence of self-consciousness can be more directly and forthrightly related to the “observing ego,” the self-reflective, self-awareness characteristic of Level 3 perspective taking. Hence, the heightened self-consciousness commonly observed in young adolescents is . in fact, a more parsimonious account of the imaginary audience, one which requires no reference to “egocentrism.”
This argument reminds one of the “verbal misunderstanding” argument that used to be leveled at Piaget’s conservation studies. It was not, the argument went, that children really believed that a quantity changed in amount when it changed in appearance. Rather it was a matter of verbal misunderstanding. Young children did not understand the words “more,” “less,” and “same” in the same way older children and adults did. Piaget’s findings were thus swept away by the phrase verbal misunderstanding, which was said to provide a better explanation than the postulation of new mental operations, coordination of relations, and so on. Explaining adolescent self-consciousness by the “observing ego” is like explaining conservation by verbal “misunderstanding.” Both explanations merely beg the question. “Verbal misunderstanding” really does not explain anything because the reasons for the verbal misunderstanding are not forthcoming. Why do young children understand “more” “less” and “same” differently than older children and adults? That question takes one back to the emergence of concrete operations. In the same way, to explain adolescent self-consciousness and the imaginary audience
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as a consequence of Level 3 role taking and of the “observing ego,” leaves unanswered the question as to why self-awareness leads to selfconsciousness? As far as I can tell, self-awareness leads to self-consciousness when the individual fails to discriminate between what the self is aware of and what others are concerned about. It is the failure to differentiate between self and others (namely, egocentrism) which renders people self-conscious, not self-awareness. I also wonder where in the world the “observing ego” comes from and what its place is in perspective-taking and role-taking theory? Introducing the phrase “observing ego” raises many more questions than it could possibly answer. ADVANTAGES
OF THE PERSPECTIVE-TAKING
POSITION
Lapsley and Murphy (1985) suggest that there are two advantages to a perspective-taking interpretation of the imaginary audience. “First, it places these constructs in a more theoretically consistent ontogenetic context, namely, the stage sequence describing social perspective-taking development” and “the model proposed here better accounts or the transition out of ‘adolescent egocentrism’. ” These two advantages provide more “conceptual clarity” than the egocentrism model. I have already covered the matter of consistency and why constructs such as “self-awareness” and “observing ego” raise many more questions than they answer. What I would like to deal with here is the matter of conceputual clarity. Erik H. Erikson never tried to define his constructs too tightly. He liked, he said (personal communication), for them to have a certain generativity that is lost when the academic wrangles over definition begin. In my own case I waited more than 10 years before trying to measure the imaginary audience construct and am still not sure it was the right thing to do. In short I do not agree with the authors that consistency and clarity are the principle advantages of a scientific construct. Rather, I would suggest that the potential of a concept to stimulate and generate thought and research is the true test of a concept’s worth and value. In this regard I believe the imaginary audience and egocentrism are generative concepts that lose their generative value if defined too tightly and particularly if they are interpreted within a purely descriptive developmental model that, as we have seen, really does not work as an explanation of social development. Let me close with an example of the generative value of the imaginary audience concept defined in terms of egocentrism, and inability to differentiate clearly between the mental representation of others’ thoughts and the real comprehension of those thoughts. Several years ago, I suggested a social cognitive dimension to obesity and anorexia (Elkind, 1981,
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1985). Obese people tend not to eat in public. They pick at their food, use artificial sweeteners, and the like. In this way they try to convince the “audience” that their obesity is of the “immaculate” sort. They are fat, they contend, not because they overeat but because they breathe the air. While the real audience is concerned with their appearance and health, the audience to which the obese person is playing is concerned with impulse control. In the same way, the borderline anorexic also eats sparingly to give the audience the impression of “Divine Thinness,” that she is thin by the grace of God and not because of her eating habits. Recently in New England, a woman from Maine claimed that she was pregnant with sextuplets and for that reason she was gaining from 100 to 120 pounds. She was on national television, made all of the newspapers, and became an instant celebrity. In the course of these programs it was revealed that her husband had had a vasectomy more than 9 months before. As it turned out, the woman really was not pregant but emotionally troubled. I mention this case because it provides a nice bit of empirical evidence for the “immaculate obesity” idea, which in turn was generated by the concept of an imaginary audience. Would the concept of an “observing ego” of “Level 3 perspective taking” have the same generative power? Particularly not if, as Lapsley and Murphy suggest, the imaginary audience is simply a matter of an “overactive imagination.” No, the imaginary audience does result from a failure to differentiate between a real audience and one that we construct in our heads. And a failure of differentiation fits nicely into basic developmental theory. Werner’s (1948) orthogenetic principle of differentiation and hierachical integration is still a foundation of developmental psychology, and a failure of differentiation is entirely consistent with this principle. There is, I believe, much to challenge in concept of adolescent egocentrism. The relation of adolescent egocentrism to formal operational thinking is an important theoretical issue, which has been and is being attacked with conflicting results. And if it turns out that adolescent egocentrism is not related to the emergence of formal operational thinking, a change in conceptualization will be called for. But I see no reason, given the data and the arguments offered here, for such a revision now. Indeed, the loss of generativity of the concept suggested by the revision would to my mind be more detrimental than any purported gain. As a scientific concept, then, the imaginary audience is certainly subject to test and modification. But I can see little of any value-and much to be lost-by the reinterpretation suggested by Lapsley and Murphy. While I appreciate their interest and efforts, I am not convinced by their arguments nor by their conclusions. But that is only one person’s opinion and someone who has written so much about the subject probably has more than his share of egocentrism.
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REFERENCES Elkind, D. (l%la). Quantity conceptions in junior and senior high school students. Journal of Genetic Psychology,
99, 269-276.
Elkind, D. (1961b). The child’s conception of his religious denomination: I. The Jewish child. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 99, 209-223. Elkind, D. (1961~). The child’s conception of right and left. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 99, 269-276. Elkind, D. (1962a). Quantity conceptions in college students. Journal of Social Psychology, 57, 459-465. Elkind, D. (1962b). The child’s conception of his religious denomination: II. The Catholic child. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 101, 185-193. Elkind, D. (1963). The child’s conception of his religious denomination: III. The Protestant child. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 103, 291-304. Elkind, D. (1966). Conservation across illusory transformations in young children. Acta Psychologica,
25, 389-400.
Elkind, D. (1967a). Egocentrism in adolescence. Child Development, 38, 1025-1034. Elkind, D. (1967b). Middle class delinquency. Mental Hygiene, 51, 80-84. Elkind, D. (1973). Cognitive structure in latency behavior. In J. CWestman (Ed.), Individual differences in children. (pp. 57-86). New York: Wiley. Elkind, D. (1981). The hurried child: Growing up too fast too soon. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. Elkind, D. (1982). Piagetian psychology and the practice of child psychiatry. Journal of the American
Academy
of Child Psychiatry,
21, 435-445.
Elkind, D. (1985). Cognitive development and adolescent disabilities. Journal ofAdolescenr Health
Care, 6(2), 422-426.
Elkind, D. & Schoenfeld, E. (1972). Identity and equivalence conservation at two age levels. Developmental
Psychology,
6, 529-523.
Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York: Norton. Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis. New York: Harper. Hartshorne, H., & May, M. A. (1928) Studies in deceit. New York: Macmillan Co. Heider, E (1958). The psychology of inrerpersonal relations. New York: Wiley. Kelley, H. H. (1971). Causal schemata and the attribution process. Morristown, NJ: General Learning. Lapsley, D. K., & Murphy, M. N. (1985). Another look at the theoretical assumptions of adolescent egocentrism. Developmenfal Review, 5, 201-217. Nelson, K. (1981). Social cognition in a script framework. In J. H. Flavell& L. Ross (Eds.). Social cognitive developmenr. (pp. 97-118) New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. Piaget, J. (1932). The moral development of the child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Piaget, J., & Inbelder, B. (1967). The child’s conception of space. New York: Norton. Selman, R. (1980). The development of interpersonal understanding. New York: Academic Press. Sullivan, H. S. (1953). The interpersonal theory of psychiatry. New York: Norton. Werner, H. (1948). The comparative psychology of menral development. New York: International Univ. Press. RECEIVED
March 25, 1985; REVISED April 23, 1985.
REVIEW
5,
218-226 (1985)
Egocentrism DAVID
Redux
ELKIND
Tufts University
This commentary addresses itself to D. K. Lapsley and M. N. Murphy’s critique (1985, Developmental Review, 5, 201-217) of my theory of egocentrism (D. Elkind, 1967, Child Development, 38, 1025-1034). These authors argue that the theory of egocentrism is inconsistent, that self-other differentiation occurs earlier than the theory suggests, and that self-consciousness does not require egocentrism. They conclude that perspective taking provides a more consistent and clear explanation of the adolescent phenomena of the imaginary audience and the personal fable than does egocentricism. I disagree and counter their arguments with my own. 6 1985 Academic Press, 1~.
It is both gratifying and disturbing to read a critique of a piece of work that was done almost 20 years earlier. The gratification comes from the fact that the concepts presented in that paper were not forgotten but rather have gained some currency in the literature of psychology and the health professions. On the other hand, the disturbance comes from the recognition that the acceptance of the ideas presented in that early paper has been far from total, and that maybe some of the criticisms are entirely warranted. But I consider such a disturbance a healthy one. Ideas and concepts which are not reflected upon and challenged and modified are not truly scientific; they become dogma-a different realm entirely. So I welcome this critique by Lapsley and Murphy (1985) of my paper on adolescent egocentrism (Elkind, 1967a). It is a thoughtful, genteel critique which raises some important issues in the field of social cognition. In my response I want to react to these more general issues as well as the particular points of their paper. A TOUCH OF HISTORY
Inasmuch as the egocentrism paper has been widely reprinted and cited, a few words about its origination might be of interest. I wrote the paper when I returned to the United States after spending a year with Piaget in Geneva. Up until that time, I had been engaged in replicating Piaget’s studies using traditional sampling, experimental, and quantitative techniques. I should confess, perhaps, that I began those studies in a highly skeptical frame of mind. It was obvious to me that Piaget’s findings would not stand the test of experimental rigor. When my data replicated Reprint requests should be addressed to the Lincoln Filene Center, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155. 218 0273-2297185$3.OO Copyright All rights
8 1985 by Academic Press, Inc. of reproduction in any form reserved.
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AND
ADOLESCENCE
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his, and the statistical tests confirmed his stages, I had a change of heart. I became, to all extents and purposes, a Piagetian. But I was also trained as a clinician and have always continued my clinical work even while carrying an academic appointment. I do the same today. At the time the paper was written, I was teaching at the University of Denver and directing the Child Study Center (a mental health clinic) run by the University. I was also working as a psychologist for the family court in Arapahoe County. It was my work with delinquent teenagers that was the impetus both for the egocentrism paper and also for a paper on middle-class delinquency (Elkind, 1967b) in which I first suggested the contract theory of socialization that is detailed in a more recent work (Elkind, 1981). I have introduced this historical information for a couple of reasons. First, Lapsley and Murphy (1985) seem to associate me with a strict (cold) cognitive position or as a kind of hard-line Piagetian. That is far from the truth. Even while in Geneva, in a study on illusory transformations (Elkind, 1966) I challenged the traditional interpretation of Piaget’s conservation task. It seemed to me then, and still does, that the conservation task measures two kinds of conservation, identity and equivalence (Elkind & Schoenfeld, 1972). Put differently, I argued that between the stage of object conservation and the stage of quantity conservation there is a stage of quality conservation (forms, colors, etc.). In the conservation papers, as in the egocentrism paper and the delinquency paper, I was stepping outside of the limits of subject matter areas Piaget had set for himself. I had done the same in my earlier studies of religious identity (Elkind, 1961b, 1962b, 1963). Fortunately, Piaget was not Freud. He did not in any way reject or isolate me for pursuing my own interests and problems. We remained on warm and friendly terms until his death. His way of handling my neoPiagetian work was simply not to acknowledge it. Piaget was very focused, and he simply did not concern himself with work outside the problems he was dealing with at the moment. I would be dishonest if I did not admit that his ignoring my work hurt a bit. For example, he would not write a preface to any of my books, in part I believe, because the contents were not strictly Piagetian. At the time, and even now, I thought I was “heating up” the cold cognition by nuzzling it up to a little clinical warmth. And I have continued in my work to try to build bridges between cognitive development and clinical and social issues (e.g., Elkind, 1973, 1982, 1985). So, whatever else it was, the egocentrism paper was not an exercise in Piaget stamped cold cognition. Quite the contrary, by publishing it and other papers I put myself at risk with regard to my standing in the Piagetian camp. Interestingly enough, some of the orthodox Piagetians had more trouble with these papers than did Piaget.
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I bring in this historical material for still another reason. It is very natural and understandable for a fresh generation of researchers to identify with a new discipline which did not exist before their time. Nevertheless, while social cognition may be a new term, it conceals an old fact. As I understand it, social cognition has to do with the conceptualization of self, others, social roles, relations, and institutions. It also seems to include the influence of social forces on development. The early studies of Hartshorne and May (1928) on moral judgment and moral behavior were studies in social cognition as was Piaget’s work on the same subject (Piaget, 1932). Likewise, theories such as those of Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) and Erik H. Erikson (1950) dealt with social cognition. How else could one classify Sullivan’s concept of “chumships” and Erikson’s concepts of “identity,” “intimacy,” and “generativity.” Lapsley and Murphy not only ignore the prehistory of social cognition, they also seem to narrow its scope and to identify it with work on perspective taking. But perspective taking is but one of many theories of socialization; it does not define the field of social cognition. For example, work on attribution theory (Kelley, 1971), on person perception (Heider, 1958), on scripts (Nelson, 1981) and frames (Goffman, 1974)are all studies in social cognition. Social cognition as a discipline is in no way coextensive with perspective taking. As a matter of fact, perspective taking is not even a very good model of socialization. The perspective-taking literature derives from the Piagetian three-mountain task (Piaget & Inhelder, 1967) whch had to do with spatial, not social, perspective taking. To extend it to the social domain ignored a fundamental Piagetian tenet; namely, do not extend cognitive concepts to other levels of analysis but rather take concepts from other disciplines and levels of observation and reinterpret them from a cognitive developmental perspective. Extending cognitive concepts to new levels of phenomena, Piaget realized, is essentially reductionistic. As a general model of socialization, role taking does not work and for quite self-evident reasons. Most of our social interactions are of the surface variety. Surface interactions are encounters with strangers whom we may never see again. Buying a newspaper, handing an usher a ticket, eating in a strange restaurant, and so on, are all surface encounters. Such encounters are regulated by implicit rules, expectancies, and understandings that Erving Goffman (1974) called “frames.” In our day-to-day surfce interactions we never bother to take the other person’s point of view because it is unnecessary. Deep social interactions are those we have with people to whom we are attached, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our wives and husbands, our children, other relatives, and close friends. Even in deep social interactions, however, perspective taking is far from routine. Indeed, as a clinician, I would say that the inability of husbands and wives or parents
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and children to see the other person’s point of view, or to credit it with any validity, is a leading cause of marital and child mental health problems. If perspective taking was the fundamental process of socialization, why should people find it so hard to take another person’s point of view? Why is it so hard to follow the golden rule, a perspective-taking admonition? It is certainly true, of course, that perspective taking does evolve with age and that our capacity to understand others who are in different emotional and motivational states than ourselves improves with age. But we all have many capacities that we do not use because they are too effortful. In buying a new car, to illustrate, we may have hundreds of choices which provide an opportunity for formal operational thinking. But most of us find something we like on the lot or in the showroom that comes close to what we want. We really do not want to go to all the trouble of choosing colors, fabrics, engine options, etc., etc., etc. And certainly in international politics, the real problems derive from each country’s unwillingness to take the other country’s point of view, or to credit it with any validity. Tourists who demand that everything in a foreign country operate as they do at home are still another example of how failure to take others’ perspectives is much more common than the reverse. In short, if one reflects upon everyday life, it is difficult to credit perspective, or role taking, with a central part in social interactions. Perspective taking is not needed at surface level interactions and is uncommon at deep level interactions. Given these considerations, perspective taking could hardly be the main engine of socialization or the heart of social cognition. In many ways, social perspective taking is like formal operational thinking; it is a capacity which we possess but which we only use in very special circumstances. With these general considerations out of the way we can turn to the specific objections to the egocentrism paper. INCONSISTENCY
Lapsley and Murphy (1985) argue first that “the account of the passage out of adolescent egocentrism is theoretically inconsistent with the transition rules established for prior variants of cognitive egocentrism.” It is certainly true that for early levels of egocentrism I have argued that they are overcome primarily by the attainment of new, higher level mental abilities. It is also true that for adolescent egocentrism I suggest that social interaction is the primary mechanism for getting teenagers to modify their imaginary audience and personal fable constructions. This switch is indeed inconsistent. But so too is growth and development. Children grow and then stop growing, intelligence peaks and then declines with age, as does physical
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vigor. Nature itself is inconsistent as even the physicists have discovered. The wave and particle theories of light are inconsistent but both work and both are necessary. A theory which is self-consistent but which does not deal with the phenomena it seeks to explain demonstrates a rather worthless consistency. There are a number of inconsistencies in the phenomena of cognitive development. Sex differences on Piagetian tasks, to illustrate, do not appear until adolescence (Elkind, 1961a, 1962a). Likewise, while most children acquire the fundamental conservation concepts of number, length, mass, and so on, some formal operational concepts such as volume conservation do not seem to be universally acquired. Any theory of development which does not take these factual inconsistencies into account would not be a very useful or a very valid hypothesis or theory. In adolescence, new levels of social interaction play the role of new mental abilities in moving young people out of their egocentric position. That may be inconsistent, but it is in keeping with the facts. SELF-OTHER
DIFFERENTIATION
A second objection to the adolescent egocentrism concept is the fact that even “Level 1 children can, not only clearly differentiate the subjectivity of self and other, but can infer with great accuracy the thoughts of the other.” The problem here is the immediate casting of the issue in perspective-taking terms. Certainly children of school age can take another person’s perspective when it is different from their own. This was quite clear in my replication (Elkind, 1961~) of Piaget’s studies of children’s conceptions of right and left. But this is far different from saying that children can infer “with great accuracy the thoughts of the other.” Even adults who know each other quite well have difficulty doing that. Selman’s studies (1980) deal with situational dilemmas which give children pretty good clues to the other person’s feeling state. Recognizing how a friend might feel if he or she lost a puppy is a relatively low-level inference and is more concerned with feeling than with thought. Consider, in contrast, a teenager who is standing in front of a mirror combing his or her hair and imagining how admiring the peer group will be. First of all, the audience itself is already a mental construction, not a factual dilemma. The teenager fails to distinguish between the concerns of the audience and the concerns of the self, because the audience is a personal construction not an external reality. The main point about the imaginary audience is the fact that it is imaginary, not real. What young adolescents can do, and what children cannot do, is create such audiences in their head. Where the young adolescent has difficulty is in recognizing the subjectivity of his or her own mental constructions. The young teenager has trouble in differentiating between
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the concerns of others he or she has created and conerns which are properly his or her own. So, the fact that children can infer the thoughts or feelings of other given the situational context, does not really speak to the issue of the imaginary audience, which is mental construction and not a social reality. Perhaps I did not make this point sufficiently clear in the original article. But when I spoke of the adolescent not being able to distinguish between the thoughts of others and his or her own, I was speaking about a mental representation of others whom they themselves had created and that were already a mental construction. The difference is not unlike that between a letter as a verbal symbol representing a concrete sound and a letter as an algebraic symbol representing another symbol, namely, a number. Put differently, a child reconstructs the thought of an existing person or persons. But an adolescent reconstructs the thought of a person or persons whom they themselves have created or constructed. The imaginary audience is a second-order, not a first-order symbolic construction. EGOCENTRISM
AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
According to Lapsley and Murphy (1985), One can dispense with the concept of egocentrism altogether, since it plays no meaningful explanatory role. If the crux of the imaginary audience construct is self-consciousness, the presence of self-consciousness can be more directly and forthrightly related to the “observing ego,” the self-reflective, self-awareness characteristic of Level 3 perspective taking. Hence, the heightened self-consciousness commonly observed in young adolescents is . in fact, a more parsimonious account of the imaginary audience, one which requires no reference to “egocentrism.”
This argument reminds one of the “verbal misunderstanding” argument that used to be leveled at Piaget’s conservation studies. It was not, the argument went, that children really believed that a quantity changed in amount when it changed in appearance. Rather it was a matter of verbal misunderstanding. Young children did not understand the words “more,” “less,” and “same” in the same way older children and adults did. Piaget’s findings were thus swept away by the phrase verbal misunderstanding, which was said to provide a better explanation than the postulation of new mental operations, coordination of relations, and so on. Explaining adolescent self-consciousness by the “observing ego” is like explaining conservation by verbal “misunderstanding.” Both explanations merely beg the question. “Verbal misunderstanding” really does not explain anything because the reasons for the verbal misunderstanding are not forthcoming. Why do young children understand “more” “less” and “same” differently than older children and adults? That question takes one back to the emergence of concrete operations. In the same way, to explain adolescent self-consciousness and the imaginary audience
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as a consequence of Level 3 role taking and of the “observing ego,” leaves unanswered the question as to why self-awareness leads to selfconsciousness? As far as I can tell, self-awareness leads to self-consciousness when the individual fails to discriminate between what the self is aware of and what others are concerned about. It is the failure to differentiate between self and others (namely, egocentrism) which renders people self-conscious, not self-awareness. I also wonder where in the world the “observing ego” comes from and what its place is in perspective-taking and role-taking theory? Introducing the phrase “observing ego” raises many more questions than it could possibly answer. ADVANTAGES
OF THE PERSPECTIVE-TAKING
POSITION
Lapsley and Murphy (1985) suggest that there are two advantages to a perspective-taking interpretation of the imaginary audience. “First, it places these constructs in a more theoretically consistent ontogenetic context, namely, the stage sequence describing social perspective-taking development” and “the model proposed here better accounts or the transition out of ‘adolescent egocentrism’. ” These two advantages provide more “conceptual clarity” than the egocentrism model. I have already covered the matter of consistency and why constructs such as “self-awareness” and “observing ego” raise many more questions than they answer. What I would like to deal with here is the matter of conceputual clarity. Erik H. Erikson never tried to define his constructs too tightly. He liked, he said (personal communication), for them to have a certain generativity that is lost when the academic wrangles over definition begin. In my own case I waited more than 10 years before trying to measure the imaginary audience construct and am still not sure it was the right thing to do. In short I do not agree with the authors that consistency and clarity are the principle advantages of a scientific construct. Rather, I would suggest that the potential of a concept to stimulate and generate thought and research is the true test of a concept’s worth and value. In this regard I believe the imaginary audience and egocentrism are generative concepts that lose their generative value if defined too tightly and particularly if they are interpreted within a purely descriptive developmental model that, as we have seen, really does not work as an explanation of social development. Let me close with an example of the generative value of the imaginary audience concept defined in terms of egocentrism, and inability to differentiate clearly between the mental representation of others’ thoughts and the real comprehension of those thoughts. Several years ago, I suggested a social cognitive dimension to obesity and anorexia (Elkind, 1981,
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1985). Obese people tend not to eat in public. They pick at their food, use artificial sweeteners, and the like. In this way they try to convince the “audience” that their obesity is of the “immaculate” sort. They are fat, they contend, not because they overeat but because they breathe the air. While the real audience is concerned with their appearance and health, the audience to which the obese person is playing is concerned with impulse control. In the same way, the borderline anorexic also eats sparingly to give the audience the impression of “Divine Thinness,” that she is thin by the grace of God and not because of her eating habits. Recently in New England, a woman from Maine claimed that she was pregnant with sextuplets and for that reason she was gaining from 100 to 120 pounds. She was on national television, made all of the newspapers, and became an instant celebrity. In the course of these programs it was revealed that her husband had had a vasectomy more than 9 months before. As it turned out, the woman really was not pregant but emotionally troubled. I mention this case because it provides a nice bit of empirical evidence for the “immaculate obesity” idea, which in turn was generated by the concept of an imaginary audience. Would the concept of an “observing ego” of “Level 3 perspective taking” have the same generative power? Particularly not if, as Lapsley and Murphy suggest, the imaginary audience is simply a matter of an “overactive imagination.” No, the imaginary audience does result from a failure to differentiate between a real audience and one that we construct in our heads. And a failure of differentiation fits nicely into basic developmental theory. Werner’s (1948) orthogenetic principle of differentiation and hierachical integration is still a foundation of developmental psychology, and a failure of differentiation is entirely consistent with this principle. There is, I believe, much to challenge in concept of adolescent egocentrism. The relation of adolescent egocentrism to formal operational thinking is an important theoretical issue, which has been and is being attacked with conflicting results. And if it turns out that adolescent egocentrism is not related to the emergence of formal operational thinking, a change in conceptualization will be called for. But I see no reason, given the data and the arguments offered here, for such a revision now. Indeed, the loss of generativity of the concept suggested by the revision would to my mind be more detrimental than any purported gain. As a scientific concept, then, the imaginary audience is certainly subject to test and modification. But I can see little of any value-and much to be lost-by the reinterpretation suggested by Lapsley and Murphy. While I appreciate their interest and efforts, I am not convinced by their arguments nor by their conclusions. But that is only one person’s opinion and someone who has written so much about the subject probably has more than his share of egocentrism.
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March 25, 1985; REVISED April 23, 1985.