From social projection to social behaviour

Abstract

Social projection is a judgemental heuristic that allows people to make quick and reasonably accurate predictions about others. The first part of this paper presents a review of the status of projection as a highly (though not fully) automatic process, its separateness from superficially similar processes of self-stereotyping, and its implications for intergroup perception. The second part places social projection within the context of the theory of evidential decision making, which highlights the benefits and the liabilities of projection in social dilemma situations. The main benefit is that projection can enhance cooperation within a group by leading individuals to believe that their own behavioural choices will be reciprocated. However, when interpersonal social dilemmas are nested within intergroup dilemmas, differential projection (i.e., strong ingroup projection paired with weak outgroup projection) yields collectively undesirable outcomes.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Maya Machunsky and Thorsten Meiser for their encouragement, support, and perceptive comments. Likewise, I am indebted to three anonymous reviewers who helped me improve this manuscript with their constructive suggestions. As usual, Judith Schrier was generous with her editorial feedback.

Notes

¹See Crisp and Hewstone (2007) for a review of research on crossed categorisation.

²Of course, the true between-groups correlation could be zero, or even negative, for carefully selected attributes. However, representative sampling of attributes will likely yield a positive correlation.

³It is unknown, and perhaps unknowable, how typical balanced payoff structures are in the social world relative to fear- or greed-biased games.

⁴Researchers typically do not ask how to achieve mutual cooperation in the game of chicken, but how to get the other player to chicken out. The methods needed for success require communication. For example, a player who manages to convince the other that he/she is crazy enough to defect will force the other to cooperate (Schelling, 1960).

⁵Mutual predictability does not entail a positive correlation between choices across pairs of players. It only entails that the probability of a matching choice is higher than the probability of a mismatching choice.

⁶During his sceptical period, Bertrand Russell rejected the notion of causality as flowing forward through time. Determinism “makes no difference between past and future: the future ‘determines’ the past in exactly the same sense in which the past “determines” the future. The word ‘determine,’ here, has a purely logical significance” (Russell, 1932, p. 195).

⁷I thank to Lauren Krueger for this simile.

⁸The value .5 for q _r is arbitrary. What matters is only that the same probability is used for both parts of the expression.

⁹Insko and colleagues refer to the “noncorrespondence of payoffs”, which is computed from the correlation between players' (or groups') payoffs across the four possible outcomes of the game. After Fisher Z transformation, the correlation between the index of non-correspondence and the K index of matrix difficulty is .72 across all possible PD games using T = 12 and S = 0 as their anchoring payoffs.

¹⁰Savvy élites induce ordinary people to make sacrifices for the group that they themselves would not dream of making.

¹¹Even biological evolution may be stimulated by the mixing of gene pools of groups that would, without conflict or conquest, remain isolated and inbred. Game theorist and Nobel Laureate of economics Robert Aumann advised researchers to avoid moral confusion by not entertaining the moral dimension of conflict in the first place. With respect to war, he suggested “Don't try to cure it. Just try to understand it” (Aumann, 2006, p. 17075, emphasis in the original).