What is the projection effect?

Ai Zi came to the land of Qilu to preach, and hundreds of people came to listen every time. One day, when Ai Zi was talking about King Wen of Zhou being imprisoned in Xianli, he happened to be summoned by King Xuan of Qi. He answered the call before he could finish the story.

One person in the audience was fascinated by it and returned home helplessly and gloomily. His wife asked him with concern: "After listening to Ai Fuzi's sermon every day, you are very happy when you come home. Why are you so sad today?"

He said: "This morning, I heard Ai Fuzi say King Wen of Zhou is a great sage, but now he is imprisoned in Xianli by his king Yin Zhou. I pity him for being imprisoned innocently, so he is very upset."

His wife wanted to comfort him, so she said, "Although King Wen is now imprisoned. If you are imprisoned for a long time, you will definitely be pardoned. How can you be imprisoned for the rest of your life?"

The man still sighed and said, "I'm not worried about not being able to be released, I'm just worried about him being in prison tonight! How hard it must be to feel guilty."

Although this joke is ridiculous, the psychological law it reflects is very serious, that is, projection: refers to the individual's own thoughts, attitudes, wishes, emotions or characteristics. etc., a psychological effect that unconsciously reacts to external things or other people. This is a deep motivation for human behavior that individuals themselves are not aware of.

Projective testing is a special personality assessment technique. In layman's terms, it is to provide some unorganized stimulus situations to the subjects, allowing the subjects to freely express their reactions in unrestricted situations. The experimenter analyzes the results of the responses and can infer the subject's personality characteristics.

There is a famous projective test in psychology, which is the Rorschach inkblot test. It is to let people look at the shapes formed accidentally with ink, and then say what they think. Through the imagination described by this person, his personality characteristics can be captured.

The Rorschach inkblot test was compiled by the Swiss psychiatrist Rorschach in 1921. It is a very representative projective test widely used in the world today. It mainly evaluates the personality characteristics projected by the subjects by observing the subjects' free responses to some standardized inkblot graphics. When this test was first created, you first dropped some ink in the center of a piece of paper, then folded the paper in half and squeezed hard to make the ink flow in all directions, forming an ink pattern that was symmetrical on both sides but had an uncertain shape.

According to this method, Roche produced a number of inkblot graphics and conducted experiments on mental patients. He found that different types of patients had different reactions to the inkblot graphics. Then we compare the responses of imbeciles, normal people, and artists, and finally select 10 of them as test materials. Gradually identify scoring methods and principles for interpreting subjects' responses.

The Rorschach inkblot test is based on the basic hypothesis that there is a relationship between perception and personality, that is, an individual's perceptual response to stimuli projects that person's personality. In particular, the differences in answer content, answer parts, and determinants reflect the different mental and psychological states of the subjects and can provide an outlook on the prognosis of the disease.

One subject repeatedly viewed the pictures as dead animals or anatomy, such as dead bears, dead bats, dog skins, human blood, skulls, etc. Soon the person committed suicide. Another person suffered from anxiety disorder, but could not find the cause and was difficult to treat. He did a Rorschach test. He actually saw sexual organs or things with sexual connotations, such as legs and breasts, many times. It turned out that he had sexual problems. Problems can be easily treated if the cause is found.

It can be seen that most of the personality structure is in the subconscious, and individuals cannot explain themselves consciously. However, when individuals face an unknown stimulating situation, they can often make the desires and needs hidden in the subconscious come into being. , motivational conflicts, etc. are revealed, that is, a structure that reflects their personality characteristics is added to the stimulus. In other words, the projection effect opens a window for us to see people's hidden psychology.

There are two manifestations of projection. One is to extrapolate external facts based on subjective thoughts. In daily life, we often unconsciously attribute our own psychological characteristics to others, thinking that others also have the same characteristics. Same characteristics. If you like lying, you think others also like lying; you feel good about yourself. Just think that others think that you are excellent.

Another manifestation of projection is blaming others.

When many people pursue something but cannot get it, in order to dilute their inner uneasiness, they have to find a rational "reason" for themselves. So I often belittle the other person, thinking that it's not that I'm not pursuing it hard or that the conditions are not enough, but that it's "not worth it" and I work too hard to comfort myself.

When Wu Zetian was in power in the Tang Dynasty, Yang Zaisi served as prime minister. One day, he was riding a sedan to enter the court. On the road, he happened to encounter a loaded ox cart that was about to leave the west gate. Because it had just rained, the road was too muddy and the oxen could not pull it.

While beating the cow with a whip, the driver cursed: "A bunch of idiot prime ministers cannot reconcile yin and yang, making this road so difficult and making us suffer so much."

Yang Zaisi happened to be passing by, and he slowly said to the driver: "Your ox is too weak, so you shouldn't scold the prime minister."

His ox was too weak to pull the cart, but he scolded the prime minister for not being able to pull the cart. Reconciling yin and yang reflects the blame-shifting effect of projection. Projection is a very common psychological defense technique used by people to forgive and relieve wrong behavior. However, if we blindly judge others by ourselves, or always blame others for our own faults, it will prevent us from correctly understanding ourselves and the outside world, and then affect the development of our relationship with the outside world. Due to the existence of the projection effect, we can often infer a person's true intentions or psychological characteristics from his or her views of others.

Once, when Zhukov came out of Stalin's office, he said angrily: "Mustache devil!" Beria, who was in the reception room, heard this and walked into Stalin's office. Tell Stalin this. Stalin had people call Zhukov back: "Comrade Zhukov, when you left my office, you said 'mustache devil'. Who were you talking about?"

"Of course it was Hitler! I also Who can you say, Comrade Stalin?"

Stalin nodded and asked Beria: "Comrade Beria, who are you talking about?"

It was precisely because Beria himself always cursed Stalin as the "mustache devil" in his heart that he naturally took Zhukov's words as being directed at Stalin and thought he had caught Zhukov's handle. Projection makes it difficult for him to see his true self and makes him prone to misjudge others, causing a lot of trouble.