Projection

The social and personality psychology literature is rife with demonstrations of the ways in which people self-deceive in the interest of maintaining favorable self-views. The desire to enhance and protect one's self-image is among the strongest of individuals' self-motives. While accomplishing this goal is certainly a multimechanistic process, one early explanation of how individuals protect and enhance the self advanced the concept of projection.

Originally proposed by Sigmund Freud as an ego-defense mechanism, projection involves perceiving one's undesirable qualities in others as a means of avoiding seeing these same faults in the self. The Freudian view assumes that such projection occurs subconsciously, as doing so effectively deceives the ego from realizing that the person possesses the negative disposition. Thus, in its original psychoanalytic conceptualization it was argued that people were unaware of possessing the unfavorable characteristics they projected onto others. Supporting this perspective, early research showed that people who were evaluated by others [Page 781]as possessing an undesirable characteristic—and importantly, lacked awareness that they possessed this trait—were more likely to see others as possessing this characteristic than were those who were keenly aware of their shortcoming.

However, succeeding social-cognitive interpretations of the phenomenon, which label the process defensive projection, challenge the notion that individuals must not be aware of possessing the undesirable trait in order for projection to occur. To the contrary, one investigation showed projection to be strongest among individuals who were mindful of possessing the projected quality. Thus, the role of conscious awareness in eliciting classic projection has been debated. Nevertheless, traditional and contemporary conceptualizations alike agree that defensive projection occurs when people seek to defend their self-image by denying the possession of certain undesirable qualities, which in turn increases the likelihood that these same characteristics will be perceived prominently in others.