The imaginary audience refers to a psychological state where an individual imagines and believes that multitudes of people are listening to or watching them.
Though the term refers to an experience exhibited in young adolescence as part of development, people of any age may harbor a fantasy of an imaginary audience.
It refers to the belief that a person is under constant, close observation by peers, family, and strangers.
This imaginary audience is proposed to account for a variety of adolescent behaviors and experiences, such as heightened self-consciousness, distortions of others' views of the self, and a tendency toward conformity and faddisms.
This natural developmental process can lead to high paranoia about whether the adolescent is being watched, if they are doing a task right and if people are judging them.
[citation needed] Jean Piaget, a Swiss developmental psychologist known for his epistemological studies with children, states that every child experiences imaginary audience during the preoperational stage of development.
[2][3][4] Gerald Adams and Randy Jones conducted a study to test imaginary audience behavior.