Free Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life by Douglas T. Kenrick Page A

defend your ego by repressing it from consciousness or by denying that the unpleasant event ever happened. One of the more interesting defense mechanisms is projection—the inclination to attribute one’s own unacceptable impulses to somebody else. Consider the oft-heard claim, “I’m not prejudiced at all”—but those damned Muslims/Christians/Jews/ Protestants, they sure are!
    Although Freud thought of projection as a neurotic means of protecting the self from anxiety, my colleagues and I thought that it might take other forms. In a series of studies in our labs, we examined a process we called “functional projection,” or the tendency to project feelings onto others in ways that best serve our own adaptive goals. Unlike Freudian projection, in which I see my own undesirable feelings in others, functional projection may lead me to see other people as having very different feelings from my own. So, for example, if I am feeling fear, it would be functional to perceive that other people are feeling anger, especially if those other people might do me harm. We would expect this projection process to be biased in ways most likely to further my survival and reproduction. And it ought to be a very directed process—I ought to perceive the functionally important emotion only in people likely to pose specific threats or opportunities. It might also play a significant role in prejudice.
    My colleagues and I wanted to know just how functional such projection could be, and we wanted to see what got projected and who it got projected onto. To find out, we showed white students facial photographs of black and white men and women. If you were a subject, you would have first heard an elaborate cover story: that you would see pictures of other people who had been photographed after having been asked to first think about a time in their life that had caused a strong emotional reaction and then to put on a neutral facial expression to hide the emotion we had evoked. Your job would be to detect the hidden emotion in the photographs. This might seem difficult,
you would be told, but people can often subconsciously notice subtle micro-expressions on other people’s faces. We would have also told you that you would do best if you based your judgments on your immediate gut reactions.
    In reality, the task had nothing to do with the ability to detect emotional micro-expressions, because all the photos were handpicked to be emotionally neutral. We were really looking to see how a person’s emotional states influenced what he or she projected onto the neutral pictures. To manipulate those emotional states, we showed each subject a movie clip, with the instructions to try to imagine what the main character was feeling. One clip was a scene from The Silence of the Lambs in which a white male serial killer stalks a white female FBI agent through a lightless basement. The scene ends with the killer, wearing night-vision goggles, reaching out to touch the woman, who is completely unable to see his hand approaching. A second clip, from Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead , depicted a highly attractive woman on a first date with a highly attractive man. The third, control clip, from the film Koyaanisqatsi , consisted of time-lapsed scenes of people going up and down on an escalator, working on an assembly line, or taking part in other activities typical of modern life.
    The emotions that our subjects “saw” in the photographs depended partly on what they were feeling, but also partly on the people in the photographs they were rating. Men who were shown the romantic movie clip tended to overperceive sexual receptivity, and to do this only for women who were physically attractive. Conversely, women who saw the same clip did not project sexual emotions onto the people in the photos, even when those people were good-looking men.
    Functional projection processes also led to a very specific type of