Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 358

“See my picture?” Ricardo asks as he holds up a blank sheet of paper. Mr. Seris answers, “You can see your picture, but I can’t. Turn your page around so that I can see your picture. There it is! It’s beautiful,” he proclaims after Ricardo flips the piece of paper, permitting him to see his drawing. Ricardo did not realize that even though he could see his drawing, Mr. Seris could not. Ricardo displays egocentrism, the inability to take another person’s point of view or perspective. The egocentric child views the world from his or her own perspective, assuming that other people share her feelings, knowledge, and even physical view of the world.

A classic task used to illustrate preoperational children’s egocentrism is the three-mountain task. As shown in Figure 7.2, the child sits at a table facing three large mountains. A teddy bear is placed in a chair across the table from the child. The child is asked how the mountains look to the teddy bear. Piaget found that young children in the preoperational stage demonstrated egocentrism because they described the scene from their own perspective rather than the teddy bear’s. They did not understand that the teddy bear would have a different view of the mountains (Piaget & Inhelder, 1967).

Figure 7.2 The Three-Mountains Task

Children who display preoperational reasoning cannot describe the scene depicted in the three-mountains task from the point of view of the teddy bear.