Egocentrism, Elkind's Contribution to Piagetian Theory

The concept of egocentrism was first introduced into developmental psychology by Jean Piaget (1955) in his classic book, The Language and Thought of the Child. In this book, Piaget revolutionized the study of children's language by exploring language development from a functional perspective. Up until this time, those who studied the growth of children's language observed the sequence in which the parts of speech emerged and/or assessed vocabulary size at successive age levels. Piaget asked a different question. He wanted to know the purpose behind children's use of language. It was in answer to this question that Piaget introduced the concept of egocentrism.

What Piaget discovered was that young children often talked at, rather than to, other children. Indeed, he observed that two children purportedly speaking to one another were actually carrying on separate dialogues. Piaget labeled such interactions “collective monologues.” He said that young children often used language as an accompaniment to their activities rather than as a means of communication. Not all of the child's verbalizations were of this sort. Children could communicate their needs and respond to adult commands and directions. These types of verbal interaction, however, did not require the child to take the other person's perspective into account.

To make the case that egocentrism was not simply a matter of language, Piaget introduced a variety of other tasks to illustrate the global egocentrism of the young child. For example, he demonstrated that a preschooler believes that the right and left hands of a person standing opposite to him or her are in the same position as his or her own. Likewise, the young child may know that he or she has a brother or sister but does not understand that this entails the sibling having a brother and sister as well (Piaget, 1951). All of these demonstrations support the assertion that egocentrism is not limited to language and that it appears whenever the task requires the child to take another's point of view.

Perhaps the most well-known demonstration of non-language egocentrism is the “three-mountains task” (Piaget & Inhelder, 1967). In this task, a mock-up of three differently sized mountains are placed on a table. The child is seated in front of one of the mountains and is asked first to draw the three mountains as he or she sees them from where he or she is sitting. Then the child is asked to draw the mountains as they would appear from the perspective of a doll sitting opposite to him or her. Young children draw pretty much the same picture for the doll's perspective as they do for their own. Older children, however, draw [Page 393]the mountains differently when they are asked to draw them from the doll's perspective.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Piaget employed a sociological model of development. He believed that mental growth was essentially a process of socialization—of learning to take the other person's perspective. Accordingly, young children were egocentric, relatively unsocialized, because they could not yet put themselves in another person's position. With increasing mental maturity, children become progressively able to take the perspectives of others in ever-more-complex ways. In adolescence, for example, young people are able to take the roles of others.

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