Adolescents' reactions to hypothetical peer group conversations: Evidence for an imaginary audience?

The theory of adolescent egocentrism holds that early adolescents have a di storted understanding of self-other relations; because of flaws in the trad itional methods used to assess adolescent egocentrism, this notion has neve r received adequate empirical scrutiny. In the present research, the nature of early adolescent social cognition as characterized by that theory was i nvestigated by examining age differences in judgments of hypothetical peer group conversations. In Study 1, children and early adolescents (N = 264) r ated the attentiveness, criticalness, and admiration expressed in three con versations, in which the subject or a peer was mentioned in either an admir ing, critical, or nonevaluative manner. In Study 2, a similar procedure was used with middle and late adolescents, as well as children and early adole scents (N = 187); two memory tasks were also administered to visit the issu e of distortion in social cognition. In Study 3, a new sample (N = 1,019) r epresenting the four age groups from Study 2 was presented with an ambiguou s conversation and then asked to interpret who was the target (object of fo cus) and how that target was regarded. The findings from the three studies do not support the notion that adolescents believe others are attentive to and critical of their every move, or that their social cognition and percep tion is egocentric and distorted. Conceptual and methodological contributio ns are discussed, along with directions for additional research.