Egocentrism

History

Jean Piaget is credited with the classic demonstration of egocentric reasoning in children. In one version of his experiments, children viewed a three-dimensional mountain scene that included a house that was visible from their perspective but occluded from the imaginary perspective of a stuffed bear on the other side of the scene. The children indicated that the house could also be seen from the bear's perspective, leading Piaget to conclude that children of a certain age are unable to recognize that other beings can have differing points of view. Subsequent experiments revealed potential methodological flaws in the mountain task, but improved paradigms led researchers to draw essentially the same conclusions.

Since Piaget's demonstrations, research on egocentrism has advanced in various ways. First, egocentric biases have been widely demonstrated in adults. Like children, adults readily activate egocentric knowledge when rendering judgments, but unlike children, adults learn to correct egocentric knowledge to accommodate another person's perspective. Such corrective procedures require time, mental effort, and awareness of the need to correct. Insufficient correction is a common cause of egocentric biases in judgments among adults. Second, research on egocentric biases has expanded beyond visual perspective to incorporate perspectives based on knowledge, experience, culture, attitudes, and mood.

Consequences of Egocentrism

Egocentric reasoning can occur in at least three stages of processing and can, in turn, have consequences for both acquiring and communicating knowledge.

First, people must make sense of their environment by forming representations based on their perceptions. With visual information, for example, people are generally good at forming three-dimensional representations, based on their own singular perspectives, and inferring others' perspectives from this. Consequences may emerge, however, when they neglect to consider others' perspectives simultaneously. This can be illustrated by the presenter who repeatedly points at his own computer monitor, visible only to him, rather than gesturing toward the projection of this image, which is visible to the entire audience.

Second, people understand the past and the future according to their current perspectives. For example, people often use their current knowledge when judging the past. This leads to the logic referenced by aphorisms such as ‘hindsight is 20/20.’ When judging past decisions made under uncertainty, people will often rely on the outcome without appreciating that the outcome could not have been known at the time of the decision.

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