How do you cure egocentrism?

Answer 1

Disclaimer: this is all opinion. I have studied some of what the experts say, but I am neither a certified expert nor a certified professional. This is opinion and suggestion. I will embolden the pieces that are from what I believe are reliable sources, but please take those with a grain of salt, as well.

If by egocentrism you mean the inability to distinguish between one's own perceptions and others' perceptions, then the cure(s) may involve the following:

- Observe the world and realize that your expectations and will sometimes change (unless you're highly, highly, unbelievably unusual) because of your observations and that we're biased to believe that we used to be like, feel like and think like we are and do now. This can cause the errant belief that we knew what would happen; furthermore, it can make changing our wills into fooling ourselves into believing that we did will something into being, as if we will something now, then the bias may cause us to believe that we willed the thing before.

- See things as being separate from yourself when they are. An aid in doing this may be trying to control them with intention and watching them behave utterly independently of your intention, which you must not change during the experiments (it may help to plan and write down what you intend before the experiment). Doing the same but instead observing people who are utterly unaware of you may help to show you this as well. Do not, however, get into the habit of trying to intend things in this fashion. Once you have the realization that you are an entity, separate, who can engage with others deeply, stop and reorganize your views given the new understanding such that engaging deeply with others is a choice and you can distinguish between yourself, them, what comes from you, and what comes from them.

- Recall the times when people "came out of left field," brought up information that you were simply not privy to before they mentioned it, or figured things out in a fashion and with an approach that you simply would not have used. This will also demonstrate others' separateness.

- Be aware that those with whom we interact directly often step into our expectations, empathize with us, and engage in groupthinking-type behaviors; this means that we can affect each other via communicative processes such as speech, projection, nonverbal cues, and empathy, and sometimes even confuse components, such as thoughts and pieces and, sometimes, though rarely, even the entirety, of paradigms, of others' minds with our own, not that we are not separate. Beware self-fulfilling prophecy, the confirmation bias, the availability heuristic, the power of suggestion - which, when insidious, and like self-fulfilling prophecy, may be linked to the imagination/mind testing out proposals and then confabulating or otherwise undergoing processes of oversight that lend the proposals, which may have taken a variety of forms, credibility - projective identification, Narcissism - likely caused by some combination of an inability to properly regulate self-esteem, poor parental care, abuse, inability to cope with shame, and the like - and anything else that may cause a suboptimal situation.

I recommend that you look up terms you didn't know because they are interesting and useful to me and I suppose, not egocentrically, I hope, that I am both correct and that they will be the same to you. I would say the same about looking up the cognitive distortions and cognitive biases, too, if you have an hour and fifteen.

Again, I'm not a professional or an expert. Please do not assume I understand.

In any event, good luck. :)