Egocentrism

A child playing hide-and-seek runs to the corner of the room and covers her eyes with a pillow while her father counts to 10, believing that if she cannot see her father, then her father cannot see her. A thirsty grocery shopper spends more money than usual on bottled water and decides not to buy the salty pretzels that are on his shopping list. Political conservatives responding to an Internet poll estimate that there are more like-minded conservatives in the population than political liberals. All of these people are reasoning egocentrically. That is, they are all reasoning about the world from their own current perspectives. In the first place, people process incoming information from their own perspective. Then, they extrapolate in two ways: temporally, extending ...