Another characteristic of young adolescence made possible by the advent of formal operations is what Elkind has called the imaginary audience. It is this characteristic that accounts for the junior higher's extreme self-conscious. Formal operations enable young people to think about other people's thinking. This new ability to think about other people's thoughts, however, is coupled with the inability to distinguish between what is of interest to others and what is of interest to the self. Since junior highers are prprimarily preoccupied with themselves, they assume that everyone else has the same concern. Young adolescents believe that everyone in their vicinity is thinking about what they themselves are thinking about, namely "me". They feel like they are appearance and behavior as they are. They surround themselves with an imaginary audience.

This is another reason why young people teenagers will spend so much time in the bathroom bathing and combing their hair. When they stand in front of the mirror, they imagine how everyone else will see them and what they will think. Everyone does this to some extent, but with junior highers, it is commonly obsessive.

The imaginary audience also helps to explain why junior highers feel such a need to show off or to engage in disruptive or destructive behavior. In many respects such behavior is really a performance. When a young person commits an act of vandalism, for audience than he is about destroying property.

Fortunately imaginary-audience behavior tends to decline with age as young people come to realize that other people have their own problems and concerns. But until then the imaginary audience is very indeed. Elkind suggests that we can help kids learn to differentiate between their own concerns and the concerns of others by taking a middle-ground position. If a junior higher says that nobody likes him, for example, it would do no good to tell him that people do like him. Instead, it would better to say, well, I like you. And frankly I can't understand why others wouldn't like you, too. What do others say or do that makes you feel that way? This approach helps kids to test their feelings against reality and to see the world as it really is.

@Orchidaceae