Piaget's Argument

Piaget theorized that adolescents in the formal operational stage experience their own form of egocentrism that includes an imaginary audience and a personal fable. The imaginary audience exists as a belief that one is the center of everyone else’s attention; adolescents with these beliefs may assume that everyone is noticing their inadequacies or criticizing them for certain things about their physical appearance. The girl in the video shows a prime example of this belief by thinking that everyone at her school was looking at her hair, which she believed was a spectacle to be criticized by her peers. A personal fable is an adolescent’s belief that they are unique, and that their behaviors or experiences are individual, and/or, better than other’s their age. The girl in the video does not necessarily display this belief; however, she may have believed that none of her imaginary audience has experienced hair troubles similar to hers. She needed reassurance that the majority of people wake up and have bad-hair days. While preschool children similarly cannot see the world from someone else’s perspective, Piaget’s
The ability to think abstractly also plays a major role in this stage of development; adolescents can begin to picture their futures and anticipate handling certain situations. By monitoring their own thoughts, adolescents can consider the negative perceptions anticipated from their imaginary audience and take actions to make themselves feel better, for example, the girl in the video eluded to that fact that she puts her hair in a pony tail before bed in order to avoid messy hair in the morning. Eventually, an adolescent can realize that their imaginary audience or personal fable are indeed imaginary and fable. They can then use the concept of metacognition to refine their cognitive