Pretend Play and Egocentrism

Regarding Tuesday’s lecture on Pretend Play, I found it interesting to learn that some adults still have imaginary friends. I realize the adult version of the imaginary friend may often take a very different form than the childhood playmate, but my first reaction to this information was surprise and skepticism that adults would continue to maintain relationships with fictional characters.

However, this reminded me of a study I read for another class, describing another child-like thought process that changes in a similar way as the child matures. This was the idea of egocentrism. When my psychology classes have covered this topic, they have taught that this is a stage a child leaves at about age five, and after this point the child/adult no longer interprets the world egocentrically. This study was designed to explore that theory. The main part of the study used a variation of the “Sally doll” experiment, where a doll leaves a room, someone moves a toy she had put away, and the child is asked where “Sally” will look for the toy when she returns. In the variation for adults, there were four boxes, each painted a different color. “Sally” left her toy in one box, and when she left, her friend moved the toy to another box – and moved all four boxes, so when “Sally” returned, she found them in a different order than when she left. Half of the adults were also told where the friend hid “Sally’s” toy. The adults were then asked to assign a probability to each box (0 to 100 percent), showing what they thought the chance was that “Sally” would check that box first to find her toy.

The adults that were not told which box currently held the toy assigned equal probability to all four boxes. The adults that did know the new location of the toy assigned a slightly higher probability to the box that contained the toy. Although the scenario was significantly more complex than the traditional “Sally doll” experiment, it appears that adults also may use some egocentric thought processes. I think the adult version of the invisible friend is similar to this. The child does not completely lose their way of thinking, or replace it with something new – instead, the old behaviors and thought processes are modified and adapted and merged with new, better, and more mature ones. Some studies we’ve read in this class have indicated other areas where adults display similar thinking patters to children, such as determining which side of a scale will go down depending on the magnitude and location of weights. I think it would be very interesting to see the results from similar experiments exploring other thought patterns and behaviors from childhood that are assumed not to exist in adults.