WHAT ARE EGOCENTRISM AND THEORY OF MIND?
Egocentrism is often understood as a moral concept: morally egocentric people regard their own thoughts and needs as most important and willfully fail to account for the needs and intentions of others in making their decisions about how to act. Quite distinct from this moral concept is egocentrism as a cognitive limitation: people with cognitive egocentrism have neurologically-based difficulty “reading” others’ mental states and considering events from another person’s perspective. In this sense, toddlers and young preschoolers are egocentric in that they lack the cognitive resources to see the world from alternative perspectives, but saying that they are egocentric is not a moral judgment. The same can be said about older children and adults with brain injury related egocentrism: their difficulty perceiving the world from alternative perspectives is a cognitive impairment, not a moral failing. In recent years, themes related to cognitive egocentrism have increasingly been discussed un
