Discuss the limitations of preoperational thought from Piaget's point of view

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

For Piaget, the most fundamental deficiency of preoperational thinking is egocentrism—failure to distinguish others' symbolic viewpoints from one's own. He believed that when children first mentally represent the world, they tend to focus on their own viewpoint and to assume that others perceive, think, and feel the same way they do. Egocentrism is responsible for preoperational children's animistic thinking—the belief that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities, such as thoughts, wishes, feelings, and intentions. Piaget argued that young children's egocentric bias prevents them from accommodating, or reflecting on and revising their faulty reasoning in response to their physical and social worlds.
Piaget's famous conservation tasks reveal several deficiencies of preoperational thinking. Conservation refers to the idea that certain physical characteristics of objects remain the same, even when their outward appearance changes. The inability to conserve highlights several related aspects of preoperational children's thinking. First, their understanding is centered, or characterized by centration. They focus on one aspect of a situation, neglecting other important features.
The most important illogical feature of preoperational thought is irreversibility. Reversibility—the ability to go through a series of steps in a problem and then mentally reverse direction, returning to the starting point—is part of every logical operation. Preoperational children also have difficulty with hierarchical classification—the organization of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences.