What is the scientific basis behind the observation of ‘projection’, i.e. that, if a person expects others to behave a certain way, it’s also likely they exhibit tendency towards the same behaviour?
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Humans learn by experience. If all of my experience points to a certain reaction, then it’s easy to assume that others would react the same way. The best you can do is consciously try to empathize or place yourself in others’ shoes. Understanding other viewpoints is the antidote to projection
We relate to what we recognize, and we recognize what we know intimately (even if it’s only half-consciously). That’s the idea. The philosophic school of thought that theorized “constructivism” has majorly impacted this concept, especially after the religion-based social culture of community and swarm intelligence became replaced by individuality on a mass scale.
The *psychological* notion of ‘projection’ has little scientific basis. It’s a theory promulgated by early psychologists that relies on untestable hypotheses. Basically, the notion is that you’re trying to assuage your own guilt or bad feelings by ‘projecting’ them onto others.
The *social* notion of ‘projection’ is based on the idea that our framework for understanding others is established by our understanding of ourselves. There has been research done to establish the validity of this model, so it can be regarded as scientific.
It’s about the belief systems. If someone is a liar, their world view revolves around lying and manipulating, so they think and believe that this is the way to live life. And they assume since this is “the way”, that other people have figured out the way themselves and are doing the same.
Projection is simply a part of being human i think, we cant see things objectively sometimes so we assume that our qualities and beliefs are the universal truth and that everyone is like that.
This may be describing the [false consensus effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect), where people believe (incorrectly) that the majority of the population agrees with them about stuff.
The basis for it is that people will often use their own beliefs and behavior to model the behavior of others, basically as a primitive form of empathy.
The problem with this is that it assumes that other people have similar motivations and beliefs to you, which is often not the case, especially for people who disagree with you.
This has been widely experimentally observed, and is fundamentally caused by poor empathetic ability (a poor ability to understand how others feel) as well as motivated reasoning (people wanting to believe it is true). A lot of people exhibit this behavior.
Breaking yourself of this habit is necessary to see people as they truly are, but it is difficult for most people.
It links into a lot of other phenomena, like [attribution bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_bias).
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