[6] Research has since shown that this phenomenon has links to the projection of attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs onto others in a wide variety of social contexts.
[1] Early research found that as a prerequisite for social projection to occur, individuals must perceive the other or group as similar to themselves in some capacity.
Research shows that individuals are more likely to project their own thoughts or beliefs onto others when their perception of the other person or group is more positive.
[2] Despite the consistency of these effects across domains of emotion and behavior, differences in the strength of this phenomenon have been shown to depend on whether projections are targeted towards a common ingroup or an outgroup.
[11] A similar effect was found in studies assessing social projection and the perception of cooperative behavior.
[13] Psychologists argue that this tendency for individuals to believe others will act in similar ways as themselves has functional impacts on improving group cohesion and cooperative behavior.
Michael Wenzel and Amélie Mummendey created the ingroup projection model to describe the specific process of group-based social projection which states that individuals compare their ingroup to other similar groups using the frame of a common superordinate group identity.
However when the group is viewed negatively, individual level social projection becomes the dominant effect in ascribing traits to others.
Results suggest that imagined contact is able to facilitate social projection processes in outgroup contexts.
One analysis found that the strength of social projection is dependent on group member status and actual consensus.
[20] The two main beliefs regarding the psychological underpinnings of social projection are based in cognitive and motivational approaches.
[2] Cognitive approaches seek to investigate social projection as an underlying psychological heuristic in the evaluation of others.
Researchers suggest that this is evidence that social projection is a heuristic process that is readily utilized when group based information is ambiguous.
[21] Research utilizing implicit association tests have also been used as evidence of social projection as a heuristic process, as researchers claim the tendency for individuals to ascribe self relevant traits to targeted groups in an implicit paradigm suggests a level of automaticity in processing.
[23] Further underscoring this point, priming studies show that reliance on social projection may be the result of salient information.
[25] Others have found that the impact of valence on social projection processes points to the need for individuals to drive connection through positive attributions.
[19] To address these problems, modern research has sought to understand when and how social projection and self-stereotyping contribute to the formation of beliefs about others using self-relevant information.
[28] Others have argued that social projection and self-stereotyping are processes that work in tandem when an individual evaluates similarities between the self and others.