Egocentrism: Stage or State?*

How does a child conceptualize the point of view of others, how does this conception vary under different sets of circumstances, and how does it change as the child grows older? Piaget and Inhelder2 made the interesting, anomalous, and readily replicable finding that when presented with what is, by adult standards, a moderately complex task, children until the age of about seven years will persistently indicate their own point of view when asked for the point of view of another. From this and related phenomena they have argued that young children go through a developmental stage during which they have difficulty understanding points of view different from their own because these points of view are not their own. Because of the elegant and perplexing nature of Piaget and Inhelder's finding, experimenters have emphasized situations in which the child does not give the point of view of the other but instead projects his own point of view onto the other. Our experience administering complex perspective identification tasks to children gave us the feeling that the egocentric responses children make are a defense mechanism which they employ to escape from complex threatening situations. We believe this defensiveness is only indirectly related to the fact that the point of view asked for is not the child's own. Furthermore, we hold that this difficulty is the direct result of the logical complexity of the task of calculating