Projection: Perceptions of Causal Responsibility and Relative Worth

Abstract

A number of social psychological studies have found that subjects “project” negative personal characteristics onto similar, but not different, others. A wide variety of theoretical explanations have been offered to explain these data. In order to advance conceptual understanding of the forces responsible for projection, two processes which may be operative are proposed and distinguished: (1) reference projection—in which the subject reduces his personal causal responsibility for a negative characteristic by believing that many others who are in his reference category share his fate, and (2) comparison projection—in which the subject reduces the negativeness of a characteristic by lowering the positions of others in his reference category, thereby raising his own relative position on the dimension. Factors which may influence the use of each technique are discussed, as is the connection between these processes and concepts from social comparison theory and attribution theory.