October 27, 2025
Seeing What Isn’t Out There
A Meditation on Various Forms of Projection
By Alfie Kohn
We’re all familiar with the way some people attribute their own problematic traits or feelings to others. Projection, as described by Freud and his followers, was originally conceived as a defense mechanism that operated unconsciously. Think of the perpetually angry person who insists that everyone else suffers from an anger problem. Or the homophobic guy complaining that gays are constantly trying to tempt him (because he’s in denial about his own attraction to men). The concept is so useful that it’s routinely invoked even by people unfamiliar with psychoanalysis.
But projection can help us to make sense of an even wider range of phenomena once we realize that it isn’t limited to the personal characteristics that one person sees in other people. Ideas and other qualities can be projected as well — for political, philosophical, or ideological purposes — and the screen on which we claim to see our own features can be a whole class of people. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be people.
Let’s explore the varieties one by one. These days we’re familiar with the political uses of projection — for example, the way that virtually every accusation leveled by Trump and his allies amounts to a confession. Each week seems to bring example after example of MAGA loyalists attributing their misdeeds to liberals or Democrats: “They’re the ones weaponizing government!” (or stealing elections, or celebrating violence…)
Underlying such specific claims is the projection of extremism itself. Republicans today don’t think twice about taking positions that not long ago were consigned to neo-Nazis and fringe conspiracy theorists. But they do so while accusing their critics — centrist Democrats, moderate liberals, and, indeed, anyone who defends the rule of law — of being “far left,” “Communists,” or “terrorists.” This projection of radicalism is stunning in its audacity and dishonesty, but it has long been a hallmark of totalitarian regimes, from European fascists to Latin American juntas. (You can judge for yourself which examples of political projection operate unconsciously, as a kind of collective defense mechanism, as opposed to being employed as a calculated strategy to justify political repression.)
Another form of projection, also employed by groups rather than individuals, attributes certain features to the nonhuman realm. One example was offered recently by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang. He observed that tech titans sometimes warn us that AI could (a) eventually acquire intelligence that surpasses that of its creators and then (b) use that intelligence to dominate us, eventually leading to human extinction. But why do they assume that (a) would lead to (b)?
Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences?…When Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism…. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk assume that a superintelligent AI will stop at nothing to achieve its goals because that’s the attitude they adopted….The way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.
The techno-doomsters, in other words, may think they’re warning us about AI, but what they’re actually doing is showing us an MRI scan of their own septic psyches.
This, however, is not the only example of people with a certain ideological bent projecting their own values onto something other than people. Consider the concept of “survival of the fittest,” a term coined not by Darwin but by the reactionary writer Herbert Spencer, who twisted Darwin’s theory of natural selection to justify a starve-the-poor, good-riddance-to-the-inferior-races agenda. More generally, people who live in societies organized around the idea of competition tend to see the natural world through that lens as well. Then they cite that supposed law of nature to justify the social and economic arrangements with which they’re familiar.
John Wiens, an evolutionary biologist, laid out considerable evidence that “competition is not the ubiquitous force that many ecologists have believed” — a realization shared by more and more scientists, incidentally1 — and then paused to ask why they are “so preoccupied with competition.” Well, it “occupies a central position in Western culture,” he eventually concluded. “Little wonder, then, that community ecologists expected…that the primary factor organizing communities would be competition.”2
This error is hardly limited to ecologists. The transmutation of natural selection into a relentless quest for dominance reflects a common tendency to create biological theories according to the biases shaped by one’s social milieu. (Unconsciously, we project our values and institutions onto nature.) Then these theories — congealed into a narrative of the natural world — are used to legitimate our values and institutions. (Consciously, we cite nature to justify ourselves.) Friedrich Engels referred to this two-step process as an ideological “conjurer’s trick.”3
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Socially mediated projection onto other species — or onto chatbots — obviously goes a step beyond what happens when an individual or political party projects its characteristics onto other people. But it dawned on me that the most sweeping form of projection may be anthropomorphism. In this case, what is falsely believed to be “out there” is not anger, extremism, megalomania, or competitiveness. It is humanness itself.
All of us anthropomorphize at times. We do it playfully when we beg a reluctant car to start — or even when we refer to a car as “reluctant.” We (or writers, anyway) do it with fanciful representations of the world around us, as when trees are described as lonely or ocean waves as aggressive. (This dates back at least to Homer, who talked about spears that were hungry for flesh.) We do it instinctively when we see a human face in a random collection of small shapes within a circle, such as the moon — or when our first assumption is that dolphins are smiling at us. We do it more often if we’re lonely, studies show. (Recall Tom Hanks’s character and his volleyball in the movie Cast Away.) Corporations exploit our propensity to do it when they create human or human-like mascots to represent the products they want to sell us.
Sometimes we engage in conventional projection — attributing our own qualities to others — on top of the broader projection that constitutes anthropomorphism. Think of a child who believes that the clothes in his closet are, like him, afraid of the dark. Or of people who believe their dog or cat is looking at them critically after they’ve done something about which they’re ashamed.
Anthropomorphism is a developmental phenomenon, but only to a point. “Young children show a particular penchant for attributing life and mental states to nearly all stimuli in the environment,” a group of psychologists at the University of Chicago wrote. “The reduction in anthropomorphism that comes with age may…reflect the deliberate correction” of an automatic tendency by people of all ages to project human characteristics onto nonhuman things.4 But even children can anthropomorphize playfully, delighting in the personalities that they invent for their toys while understanding that it’s just a game.5 They know their stuffed bunny doesn’t really miss them when they’re gone.
Conversely, however, even some adults do seem to seriously believe that inanimate objects have thoughts, feelings, or volition. Think again about computers. Back in the 1960s, people who interacted with a chatbot prototype known as ELIZA anthropomorphized it to a remarkable extent, imaginatively endowing the responses it was programmed to generate with human attributes like insight or empathy and reporting that they felt “seen” or supported. ELIZA’s creator later marveled that “extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”6
Today’s far more sophisticated chatbots, based on large language models, are explicitly designed by tech companies so that we will see ourselves in them, falsely imagine them to have minds, and even develop “relationships” with these counterfeit humans. The question isn’t whether “humans can relate to a deceptive social machine,” one computer scientist remarks. “Of course they can. The issue is ‘Do we recognize that humans and machines are different categories?’”
Perhaps the ultimate example of seeing human qualities where they don’t exist — along with an overpowering motivation to do so — was captured in a line of poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay:
…it is utter
Terror and loneliness
That drive a man to address the Void as “Thou.”Here the universe itself is treated as a sentient entity that has a plan for us. Alternatively, everything in existence is thought to be directed by some sort of superhuman being, with the result that natural occurrences (weather or diseases, say) are interpreted as messages for us.
Religion at its core can be understood as anthropomorphism, as can spiritual belief systems whose adherents are convinced that everything happens for a reason and was “meant to be.” This is understandable: It is deeply unsettling to acknowledge the contingency of existence — the fact that things actually happen for no reason at all and easily could have turned out otherwise, that no grand plan exists, that nothing is meant to be. Of course, we can, and do, invent reasons to try to make sense of things after they occur. Similarly, we generate rules, purposes, meanings, principles, and values — and we try to persuade (or sometimes compel) others to adopt them as well. The trouble comes when we toss these human inventions up to the heavens, so to speak, and later point in that direction as if they had originated there. (This is just another version of Engels’s two-step conjurer’s trick.) We deny our authorship and bestow upon our values and purposes a status of absolute, eternal truth.7
Humans have a powerful need to believe that we as a species aren’t on our own, that death isn’t really the end, and that an all-present entity we can identify with (because it resembles us even if it’s invisible) is watching us and has a plan for us. As Thomas Hardy memorably pointed out, we would sooner believe in the existence of a fiendish force determined to torture us than abandon our projection and acknowledge cosmic indifference to our fate. We don’t want to admit that no meanings and values exist other than the flawed, uncertain ones people create.
It’s hard to outgrow our natural tendency to anthropomorphize. This entails a lifelong struggle to see things as they truly are, no matter how unsettling (thereby engaging in what Abraham Maslow called “need-disinterested perception”), rather than seeing things the way we wish they were (which other psychologists have called “motivated reasoning”).
Indeed, this challenge is of a piece with striving to acknowledge that it may be I, rather than everyone else, who’s angry all the time. Or that it’s my political party, rather than yours, that’s undermining democracy. Or that members of other species are not necessarily driven to triumph over one another in the way that so many members of our society are. Or that ChatGPT does not have a mind (and AI in general may not share the unsavory features of its creators). If seeing clearly is a defining feature of a life well-lived, then resisting all the varieties of projection is an important means to that end.
NOTES
1. For evidence that challenges assumptions about competition’s pervasiveness in the natural world, see Robert Augros and George Stanciu, The New Biology (New Science Library, 1988); John Favini, “What if Competition Isn’t as ‘Natural’ as We Think?”, Slate, January 23, 2020; and Frans de Waal, “How Bad Biology Killed the Economy,” RSA Journal, Winter 2009. One biologist, Douglas Boucher, describes nature as “green in root and flower” (see Anne Fausto-Sterling, “Is Nature Really Red in Tooth and Claw?”, Discover, April 1993, pp. 24-7), while another, Martin Nowak, talks about the widespread “snuggle for survival” (see Kelly Clancy, “Survival of the Friendliest,” Nautilus, March 17, 2017). Without denying the existence of competition, we can acknowledge the critical role that cooperation plays in species from bacteria (Gina Kolata, “Bacteria Are Found to Thrive on a Rich Social Life,” New York Times, October 13, 1992) to apes and monkeys (R.W. Sussman et al., “Importance of Cooperation and Affiliation in the Evolution of Primate Sociality,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 128 [2005]: 84-97).
2. John A. Wiens, “Competition or Peaceful Coexistence?” Natural History, March 1983, p. 34.
3. Engels put it this way in 1875: “The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes’s doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes [a war of all against all] and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus’s theory of population. When this conjurer’s trick has been performed…the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved” (quoted in R.C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature [Pantheon, 1984], p. 309n30). The same basic observation has been made by a number of other social scientists, including Marshall Sahlins, Ashley Montagu, and Richard Hofstadter.
4. Nicholas Epley, Adam Waytz, and John T. Cacioppo, “On Seeing Human: A Three-Way Theory of Anthropomorphism,” Psychological Review 114 (2007), p. 870. This article provides a useful overview of the phenomenon, as does Stewart Guthrie’s book, Faces in the Clouds (Oxford University Press, 1993).
5. This reality might lead us to wonder why, at Christmastime, so many adults assume children can’t enjoy the Santa myth unless we lie to them by presenting it as literal truth.
6. Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (Freeman, 1976), p. 7.
7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus used the phrases “l’esprit serieux” and “bad faith” to describe this process.
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