"Murphy's Law" projection effect, don't judge others by yourself

The famous scholar Su Dongpo of the Song Dynasty was good friends with the monk Foyin. One day, Su Dongpo went to visit Foyin and sat opposite Foyin. Su Dongpo joked to Foyin: "I think you are a piece of shit." "But Foyin smiled and said: "I think you are a golden Buddha." Su Dongpo felt that he had taken advantage of it and was very proud. After returning home, Su Dongpo proudly mentioned this matter to his sister. Su Xiaomei said: "Brother, you are wrong. Buddhism says that 'Buddha's heart appears by itself'. What you see in others means that you see what you are."

Maybe you will laugh it off, but Su Xiaomei’s words do make sense. You may want to ask why Su Xiaomei's words make sense. From a psychological perspective, she just pointed out the projection effect that people like to project their own thoughts onto others. As the saying goes, "A villain's heart is used to judge a gentleman's belly." It means that villains always like to use their own despicable thoughts to guess people of noble character.

Similarly, there was such a funny joke:

One night, on a dark and remote road, a young man's car broke down - the car tire exploded .

The young man came down and rummaged through the tool box, but couldn't find the jack. what to do? No cars pass this road for a long time. He saw a lighted house in the distance and decided to go to that house to borrow a jack. But he had a lot of worries. On the way, he kept thinking:

"What if no one comes to open the door?"

"What if there is no jack?"

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"What if that guy has a jack but refuses to lend it to me?"

...

As he continued to think about this, he became more and more worried. The angrier I get. When he walked to the house and knocked on the door, as soon as the owner came out, he shouted at him: "What's so special about your jack!"

The owner was so confused that he couldn't touch it. My mind thought that the person coming was a mental patient, so I slammed the door shut.

In the laughter, it is not difficult to find that this young man’s mistake was that he projected his own thoughts onto his master.

In interpersonal communication, when we know and evaluate others, we are often inevitably affected by our own characteristics. We always involuntarily use our own thoughts to speculate on other people's thoughts. We feel that since we think so, Others must have thought so too. For example, greedy people always think that others are also greedy for money; if they often lie, they think that others are always lying to them; if they feel good about themselves, they think that others think that they are excellent...

In 1974, the psychologist Schiffenbauer conducted such an experiment:

He invited some college students as subjects and divided them into two groups. Show comedy movies to one group of students to make them feel happy; show horror movies to another group of students to make them feel scared. Then, he showed the same set of photos to the two groups of students and asked them to judge the facial expressions of the people in the photos.

As a result, the group of college students who were in a happy mood after watching the comedy movie judged that the person in the photo also had a happy expression, while the group of college students who were nervous after watching the horror movie judged that the person in the photo was nervous and scared. expression.

This experiment shows that most of the students tested regard the facial expressions of the people in the photos as their own emotional experience, that is, projecting their own emotions onto others.

In fact, in addition to projecting one's own situation onto others, the projection effect also has another form of expression - emotional projection. That is, the more you look at people or things you like, the more you like them, and the more you look at them, the more advantages they have; the more you look at people or things you don't like, the more you dislike them, and the more you look at them, the more disadvantages they have. This situation often occurs during love. For example, when people are passionately in love, they like to brag about how perfect their significant other is in front of people around them; once they fall out of love, their hatred for the other person is overwhelming and exaggerated.

Therefore, knowing that the projection effect in the process of interpersonal communication will cause our perception of other people to be distorted, we must remain rational in the process of interacting with others to avoid the adverse effects of this effect. Influence.