What About Friends?

This is a very interesting study on how bad we are at judging our friends’ beliefs, opinions and values but why we tend to assume they match with our own.

The article covers various examples of this effect, but it mentions a finding from a shortly to be published study finding that the most socially connected people are typically the least accurate at judging their friends’ attitudes:

A similar effect arises when people are asked questions about right and wrong rather than politics.

Researchers found that people assumed, often unquestioningly, that their responses to a series of ethical dilemmas were shared by the majority of their close colleagues. In reality they often were not. More strikingly, it was the more socially connected among the test subjects who were more likely to be wrong.

Projection is a unverified psychological defense mechanism where people supposedly misperceive psychological states in other people that, in reality, they have themselves but unconsciously want to hide from their conscious mind.

This was a concept originally developed by Sigmund Freud and systematized, along with a range of other ‘defenses mechanisms’, by Anna Freud in her landmark book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.

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