It has long been assumed that the way people perceive and evaluate others is intimately related to how people perceive and evaluate themselves. For example, quite a bit of research demonstrates that a person will be sensitive to the presence of self-schematic traits (traits that one explicitly acknowledges having and sees as important) in other people. The proposed studies focus on a different approach to understanding the relationship between self- perception and other-perception: the defensive projection hypothesis. This research tests the hypothesis that people have a tendency to perceive in others those characteristics that they seek to deny in themselves. Since introduced by Sigmund and Anna Freud, the concept of defensive projection has been quite popular. Clinicians have long suspected that projection plays an important role in their clients' interpersonal problems, and other social scientists have speculated that projection contributes to intergroup hostility and conflict. There is, however, very little compelling empirical evidence for the validity of the phenomenon. Newman, Duff, and Baumeister (1997) presented a new way of conceptualizing defensive projection. According to their model, some people deal with the possibility that they are not the people they would like to be - e.g., that they are not as nice, intelligent, or honest as they would wish - by trying to actively suppress such anxiety-provoking thoughts. Unfortunately, thought suppression is doomed to failure. The very thoughts that people try to suppress ultimately become more cognitively accessible than they would have been had there been no attempt to suppress them. As a result, when people try to suppress thoughts about specific unwanted traits, those traits end up being very frequently used to make sense of other people's behavior. The proposed research is designed to further support the model and to answer two broad questions with a combination of experimental and correlational methods: (1) Can projection proceed without awareness? Does awareness of the possibility of projection actually disrupt the process? (2) Does projection actually decrease anxiety? Can it enhance positive affect and self-esteem, especially if an unwanted trait is projected onto an outgroup member? Designing effective interventions to ameliorate the pain that projection can lead to will be dependent upon a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying it and the circumstances in which it is likely to occur. The proposed studies represent another step towards that goal.
