Social Projection

Definition

Social projection refers to the tendency to assume that others are similar to oneself. Students who cheat on their statistics exams, for example, probably believe that many others cheat as well, whereas honest students think that cheating is rare. Projection is not limited to valueladen behaviors such as cheating versus being honest, and therefore, projection is not necessarily a defense mechanism. Statistically, projection is simply a positive correlation between what people say about themselves and what they believe is common in the group.

Though not considered a defense mechanism, it was believed for a long time that projection is a judgmental bias that people should rather get rid of. Surely, the argument was, people have enough information about others to make accurate estimates about the group. An individual's own attitude, preference, or personality trait is but a single bit of data that should not make a difference. It is now recognized, however, that projection can improve the accuracy of the perception of the group when knowledge of the self is all a person has.

Useful Projection

Suppose a person is brought to the laboratory and told that there are different types of people, and that each individual's type can be measured by a new test. After testing, the person is informed of being type T. Not knowing anything about how many different types there are and how common each one of them is, the person can speculate that his or her type is the most common one. Now, the person's single data point is useful. This is a good guessing strategy because most people are by definition in the majority rather than the minority.

Consider another example. A new gene is discovered, but it is unknown whether many (e.g., 90%) or few people (10%) have it. Both possibilities seem equally likely at first. Now a randomly chosen person tests positive for the gene. Because this person is more likely to represent a group in which the gene is common than a group in which it is rare, it can be inferred that the gene is common. This kind of inductive reasoning supports the idea that social projection is rational when a person has little knowledge other than self-knowledge. The more that is known about individual others, the more projection should diminish—and generally does.

A good example of a situation in which a person knows little about others is the one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma. To illustrate, suppose each of two players has a coin that must be placed heads up or tails up. If both choose heads, both get $15; if both choose tails, both get $5; if they make different choices, the one choosing heads gets nothing, whereas the one choosing tails gets $20. Heads is the cooperative choice because it leads to the best result for the group; tails is the defecting choice that yields the best outcome for the individual regardless of what the other person does. Most people project after making a choice, irrespective of what that choice was. Cooperators expect [Page 915]cooperation, and defectors expect defection. More important, social projection can increase the probability that a person chooses to cooperate. People who strongly believe that others will make the same choices as they themselves do will expect to receive the payoff for mutual cooperation ($15) rather than the sucker's payoff ($0) if they don't cooperate.

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