Piaget Egocentrism

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In his theory of cognitive development, Piaget stated that egocentrism refers to the children’s inability, during the pre-operational stage, to have any other point of view apart from their own. Children exhibit egocentrism during the pre-operational stage, which starts from two years up to seven years. During this stage, the child views the environment around him or her in his or her own perspective and disregards other people’s perspectives. At this stage, children’s thoughts are structured in such a way that they think everyone should see things the same way as the children. As a result, the child does not portray any objective reality of happenings in his or her life; the child only has subjective reality (Rathus, 2010).
Piaget performed experiments with the aim of establishing egocentrism in children and discovering the age at which children cease to be egocentric.
Children in the pre-operational stage of development tend to showcase behavior, which portrays them as self-focused, self-serving, and self-centered. As such, they consider other members of their immediate family and society at large to be part of the world in which they (the child) happen to be at the center. Key features such as animism also characterize the pre-operational stage. In this case, animism refers to the belief of children objects that are inanimate (such as toys) tend to posses human intentions and feelings (Piaget & Voneche, 2007).
Piaget and Inhelder (1956) performed the ‘three mountains’ task with the aim of finding out the age at which children have egocentric traits and the age at which they decenters. In the experiment, there is three-dimensional model of three mountains of different colors, sizes, and posses’ different features such as a hous...

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...n take a new shape when children stop thinking intuitively and move towards logical and factual thinking. Thus, the development of logical thinking in children marks the end of egocentrism (Cook & Cook, 2005).
While concluding this study, it is worth noting that egocentrism is a common phenomenon in children during the pre-operational stage of cognitive thinking. Children at this stage tend to view the world in their own perspectives and tend to disregard the perspective of other people. Therefore, thinking during the pre-operational stage tends to be centered on the child’s perspective of the world. The preoperational stage starts from two years and ends at the age of seven years. Piaget and Inhelder performed an experiment known as the ‘three mountains task’ in which they came to the conclusion that children tend to be egocentric during the pre-operational stage.

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