Adolescents who articulate principled ideals for society yet find it…

Concept — With the shift to formal-operational thinking, an adolescent becomes able to reason about propositions, possibilities and states of affairs that do not yet exist — hypothetical-deductive thought. Applied to values, this produces adolescent idealism: a principled account of how society ought to be, argued in the abstract. Reasoning about an imagined ideal case and conducting oneself in a live situation make different demands, because a real situation carries cost, habit, peer pressure and immediate consequence. Elkind named the visible gap between the two "apparent hypocrisy".

Application — The adolescent described does both things at once: states principled ideals for society, which is moral reasoning on the hypothetical case, and finds those same standards hard to carry out in daily life, which is behaviour governed by real consequences. The tension the stem names therefore lies between morality worked out hypothetically and the realistic consequences of acting.

Contrast

• Abstract reasoning and emotional regulation pairs a thinking capacity with control of emotional arousal; the stem reports a gap in conduct, not difficulty in managing feelings.

• Cognitive advancement and social inexperience pairs growing reasoning power with a thin store of lived encounters; the adolescent in the stem has already worked the standards out and stumbles at enacting them, which is a doing gap rather than an experience gap.

• Real and ideal audience belongs to the audience constructs of adolescent egocentrism — Elkind's imaginary audience concerns who an adolescent believes is watching, not the distance between stated ideals and one's own conduct.

Result — The conflict is between hypothetical morality and realistic consequences.