According to Alberts, Elkind, and Ginsberg the personal fable "is the corollary to the imaginary audience. Thinking of themselves as the center of attention, the adolescent comes to believe that it is because they are special and unique". It is found during the formal operational stage in Piagetian theory, along with the imaginary audience. Feelings of invulnerability are also common. The term "personal fable" was first coined by the psychologist David Elkind in his 1967 work Egocentrism in Adolescence. Feelings of uniqueness may stem from fascination with one's own thoughts to the point where an adolescent believes that their thoughts or experiences are completely novel and unique when compared to the thoughts or experiences of others. This belief stems from the adolescent's inability to differentiate between the concern(s) of their thoughts from the thoughts of others, while simultaneously over-differentiating their feelings. Thus, an adolescent is likely to think that everyone else (the imaginary audience) is just as concerned with them as they are; while at the same time, this adolescent might believe that they are the only person who can possibly experience whatever feelings they might be experiencing at that particular time and that these experiences are unique to them. According to David Elkind (1967), an adolescent's intense focus on oneself as the center of attention is what ultimately gives rise to the belief that one is unique, and in turn, this may give rise to feelings of invulnerability. Ultimately, the two marked characteristics of personal fable are feelings of uniqueness and invulnerability. Or as David Elkind states, "this complex of beliefs in the uniqueness of (the adolescent's) feelings and of his or her immortality might be called a 'personal fable', a story which he or she tells himself and which is not true."
Early literature on adolescent egocentrism and cognitive development Elkind's work with the personal fable stemmed from Piaget's theory of cognitive development, which describes egocentrism as a lack of differentiation in a given area of subject-object interaction. According to Elkind, in conjunction with Piaget's theory, adolescent egocentrism is to be understood in the context of ontogeny (referring to the development of an organism across its lifespan). These ontogenetic changes in egocentrism are thought to drive the development of logical and formal operational thinking. Elkind described an operation as a "mental tool whose products, series, class hierarchies, conservations, etc., are not directly derived from experience." However, a child in the concrete operational stage is not able to differentiate between these mental constructs and reality (their experiences). For instance, a child in the concrete operational stage may understand that a dog is an animal, but not all animals are dogs; however, the child is not able to grasp a hypothetical concept such as "suppose that dogs were humans". The child is likely to respond "but dogs aren't humans, they are animals." According to Elkind, the onset of adolescent egocentrism is brought on by the emergence of the formal operational stage, which allows the adolescent to mentally construct hypotheses that are contrary to reality. It is at the onset of adolescence that the individual is "freed" from the confines of concrete thought, and begins to be able to grasp abstract or hypothetical concepts (thus the formal operational way of thinking arises). Here, the individual is now able to imagine the hypothetical situation involving dogs as humans and not animals. Thus, the individual is also able to imagine, and even come to believe, hypothetical situations in which everyone is as concerned with them as they are, and in which they are unique and invulnerable when compared to others. Such contrary-to-fact propositions are what characterize the personal fable.
Egocentrism and the formal operational stage of cognition Elkind proposed the concept of teenage egocentrism, which he believes occurs during the transition to Piaget's formal operational stage of cognition (the ultimate stage in which the individual is capable of abstract thinking: hypothetical and deductive reasoning). Although the construct is still widely used in research today, there is no evidence that adolescent egocentrism follows any age-related pattern (as would be implied by the assumption that it disappears when adolescents enter the formal operational stage, a stage that some individuals never reach).
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