Question

As you can tell from the chapter notes, I believe the concepts associated with adolescent egocentrism are meaningful and helpful in understanding teenagers. For our discussion this week, think about two of the key components of adolescent egocentrism: imaginary audience and personal fable. How do you respond to these two characteristics? Do they make sense to you? Can you think of examples of these components in your life or others? (For privacy considerations, please do not provide names with any examples you offer.)

please no less than 250 word count!

Answer 1

Egocentrism is basically an important characteristic of an individual which is related to the phases of development. Though egocentrism is mainly known to be present in an individual till adolescence yet nowadays we come across a lot of younger and older adults who also exhibits egocentrism. Egocentrism is mainly the belief of an individual that the world revolves around him or her and whatever is happening all around is for him or due to him. There are various ways in which understand egocentrism and two important components of egocentrism in adolescents are 'Imaginary audience' and 'Personal fable'.

'Imaginary audience' is the belief that someone is always viewing one's actions and behaviours and thus the adolescents who exhibits imaginary audience always behave in a way which is socially acceptable and tries to be attractive always. For example, one of my friend used to always walked and looked around in a way which felt like there are cameras being installed to capture his movements and there is an audience viewing him.

'Personal fable' deals with story telling and is basically the habit of various adolescents to make up a story in which he or she plays the central role or the author backing role. This stories are mostly like helping someone out of situations, about instances of bravery and about achievement. For example, there was another friend of mine who used to make stories about his various achievements in quite about all kinds of sports action activities in his neighbourhood and most of them were false or exaggerated versions of reality.