projection bias
Summary
Projection bias is the tendency to assume that other people, or our own future selves, share our current thoughts, feelings, and preferences. Testable point: it is a cognitive bias about assumed similarity, not Freud's projection defense mechanism, which pins one's own unacceptable impulses on others.
Detail
Meaning: Projection bias is a cognitive bias in which people treat their own current thoughts, feelings, or preferences as a guide to what others hold, or to what they will hold later. It appears in two forms. Interpersonal: assuming other people share our beliefs and behaviors, which overlaps with the false consensus effect. Intertemporal: assuming our future preferences will match our present state, so a hungry shopper buys too much food. The mechanism is that our own state is vivid and easy to recall, and we adjust away from it too little.
On the MCAT: A passage describes people predicting what peers think or what they will want later, and the question asks you to name the bias or predict the estimate. The clue is that predictions track the predictor's own current state: supporters of a policy tend to overestimate how many others support it.
Common confusion: Do not confuse it with projection as a Freudian defense mechanism, an unconscious move that pins one's own unacceptable impulse on someone else (I hate him becomes he hates me). Projection bias does not depend on anxiety reduction; it is a judgment error about similarity.
Sources
- Psychology (Myers)
- Social Psychology (Aronson, Wilson, Akert)
Written for the MCAT and checked before it was published. For study reference only. Spotted an error? Let us know.