Psychological Projection

"To the selfish, all are selfish."

— Aesop of "The Fox and the Bramble"

Psychological Projection is a common behavioral phenomenon in which a character projects their own character traits, emotions, or desires to another character by presuming they feel or think the same as they. Most often, the character denies some aspect of their own thoughts or behavior while simultaneously assuming or accusing other people of doing or thinking those same things. (e.g. The Bully says, "I'm not a bully; that guy [that I'm picking on] is just a big Jerkass!") They are using themselves as a basis for understanding others and through their perception see their own flaws and virtues in other people. This is usually done unconsciously and never explicitly stated by the character, which can make it hard to notice. But if a character presumes something about another without having any reasons to think so and the presumption has something in common with themselves, they are probably projecting.

Often (though not always) a Sub-Trope of Hypocrite. Clone by Conversion is the literal version of this. This trope can sometimes be a manifestation of The Golden Rule, because people will by nature project themselves on to others and expect them to act the same as themselves. Often overlaps with Evil Cannot Comprehend Good, Good Cannot Comprehend Evil, Straw Hypocrite, Boomerang Bigot, and Protagonist-Centered Morality. Related to All Psychology Is Freudian, Darwinist Desire, and The Golden Rule. The Shadow Archetype is essentially this trope given a tangible form.

Compare Captain Oblivious. Contrast Hypocrite Has a Point, where the character's accusations have merit, despite the accuser not living up to them themselves. Not to be confused with Astral Projection or Enemy Without, which are rather more fantastic.

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Subtropes:

• Armoured Closet Gay: Somebody acts excessively macho and homophobic to hide the fact that they're gay themself.
• Author Avatar: The author of a story projects themself on a specific character in that story.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: The villain projects their own evil on to the hero and does not understand why the hero does not act as expected.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: The exact inverse; the hero projects their own good on to the villain and does not understand why the villain does not act as expected.
• Never My Fault: Character blames everyone but themselves for what they've done.
• Sex Is Evil, and I Am Horny: Character projects their own hated sexuality upon others, to the grief of many.
• Shallow Cannot Comprehend True Love: Superficial character assumes that everyone else is shallow like they are.
• Wishful Projection: Where an idea, rather than a personality trait, is projected from one person onto someone else, but that assumption is false with no factual basis.
• You Are What You Hate: Somebody shows hatred for a particular group but is secretly/unknowingly a member of that group.

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Examples:

• Anime & Manga
• Fan Works
• Video Games
• Western Animation

Comic Books

• Several Batman villains project their own origins and insecurities onto Batman.
  • This is what Joker is ultimately trying to prove in The Killing Joke, that everyone is really like him deep down — justifying his murderous madness by trying to demonstrate people being strained by worries and neuroses until they have a particularly bad day, and snap just like he did. He fails in the general sense, but in the end he still has a kindred spirit in Batman himself.
  • Hugo Strange thinks that Batman does what he does because he enjoys being powerful and feared, since that is what Strange wants to be (and for extra irony, he's a psychologist).
  • Tommy Elliot/Hush knows Batman's true identity, but thinks that Bruce Wayne is happy that his parents were killed, because Elliot's parents were abusive and he celebrated when they died.
• Lex Luthor is often shown doing this to his archenemy Superman.
  • In the story The Black Ring, Lex claims Superman doesn't empathize with humanity at all, but it's pretty clear he's projecting this trait onto his archnemesis.
  • In general, it's sometimes implied that the reason why Lex often accuses Superman of using his powers to lord over humanity is because, if their positions were reversed, that's exactly what Lex would do.
  • Several comics have stated that the reason why Lex never realizes Superman is Clark Kent because Lex himself would never deliberately pass up an opportunity to make himself look good, so the idea that Superman is actually doing his heroics anonymously while living a quiet life as a liked-but-not-adored reporter just does not compute. He even fires a computer programmer who used a facial recognition system to put the pieces together, as obviously it must be flawed in some way to come to that conclusion when Lex already knows Superman wouldn't bother with a secret identity.
  • Stories by Grant Morrison in Justice League and 52 show that Lex believes that Superman is as obsessed with him as he is with Superman, and truly thinks that everything Superman does—even just saving some random people's lives—is somehow an attempt to show him up.
  • In All-Star Superman, we get to see what Lex would do if he had Superman's powers: discard all his technology and attempt to Take Over the World with nothing but brute strength, when he accuses Superman of not needing to be smart when he has all his power. Meanwhile, Superman ultimately defeats Lex by using technology to cause his Hour of Power to run out ahead of schedule.
    "You were right, Lex... brain beats brawn every time!"
• Iron Man came to think during Secret Invasion (2008) that Captain America had been replaced by a Skrull before the events of Civil War (2006) because Cap is a reasonable person and would have agreed the Superhero Registration Act was the right thing to do if it were really him... right? Meanwhile, every other hero is trying to get at Tony to prove he was replaced by a Skrull for the opposite reasons. No one important was actually replaced by skrulls, so their actions are their own. For better or worse.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics). Invoked in Sonic Universe #63 when Espio accuses Knuckles of projecting his fear of ghosts on to him.
• Spider-Man:
  • Harry Osborn, shortly before his original death in the comics, claimed that Spider-Man only tried to 'destroy' the Osborn family because he resented their 'stable' family dynamic while he had been a burden on relatives who never wanted him, Harry's mind now so twisted that he was incapable of recognizing Norman's flaws as a parent.
  • J. Jonah Jameson's distrust of Spider-Man is often portrayed as him projecting his own cynicism and selfishness onto Spider-Man, concluding he has some sort of secret self-serving agenda.
  • In Superior Spider-Man (2023), Otto's "The Reason You Suck" Speech for Bailey reeks of this. He accuses Bailey of being "an impostor" when Otto himself stole Peter's identity and life and calls Bailey a "sad, broken little boy destined for failure" when Otto himself was trapped in a decaying body after many, many defeats at the hands of the wall-crawler. He ends his tirade by declaring that Bailey will never be Spider-Man, the very identity that Otto is trying to subsume.
• Wonder Woman (1987)
  • Circe believes everyone, including Wonder Woman, is as cynical and cruel as she is and tries to prove it, first by trying to make Diana kill a mind-controlled Superman and then by making Diana kill Circe herself on live television. Both attempts fail, and Diana retorts that Circe is really angry over feeling rejected and alone all her life and is simply projecting her own feelings onto other people.
  • Wonder Woman herself projects her own morality onto Barbara Anne Minerva, and is devastated to learn just how cruel and deceptive even the women of "man's world" can be.
  • Wonder Woman also projects her morality onto Maxima because they have so much in common and get along so well. While they both come from warrior societies, Diana's is isolationist and she left it to bring peace and love to the outside world. Maxima's society is expansionist, Maxima is largely the reason for it being that way, and she's only in The Justice League because she wants to bear the children of strong men, thinking Superman will be more receptive to her advances if she helps some poor weak people.
• The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: Getaway falls into this while lecturing Riptide, claiming that the main characters didn't take Riptide with them because they looked down on him for being unintelligent...at which point Riptide proves he's not as stupid as Getaway thinks he is by immediately pegging this as his captor's Inferiority Superiority Complex at work.
  Getaway: D'you know why Team Megatron lost interest in you? D'you know why they didn't take you to Necroworld? Clue: it's because you're not like them. Brainstorm, Ratchet, Nightbeat, Skids. They're smart guys, Riptide. And you... you're really not.
  Riptide: I'm not a psychiatrist either but I'm pretty sure this conversation says more about you than me.

Films — Animation

• This is the central character trait and biggest Fatal Flaw of Frollo in Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
  Clopin: Judge Claude Frollo longed to purge the world of vice and sin
  And he saw corruption everywhere — except within.
• In Kung Fu Panda 2, Lord Shen tells Po that his parents hated him even though there is no evidence to back this up; Shen, however, believes his own parents hated him.
• Tangled:
  • At the beginning of the movie, All-Loving Hero Rapunzel believes that she only needs to show Mother Gothel that she is capable of living outside the tower to get her permission to leave, because why would a reasonable person want to keep Rapunzel in a tower forever?
  • Mother Gothel is not only The Sociopath, but also a Control Freak who has spent the last 18 years of her life in an elaborate charade to make Rapunzel The Pawn so Gothel can use her as her own Fountain of Youth. This was necessary because once Rapunzel realizes she has so much power over Mother Gothel, why would she want to selflessly help her own mother? In addition, in a bit of gaslighting, she tells Rapunzel that the world is selfish and cruel, and would only want to use her, while actively using Rapunzel herself. This is highlighted by Rapunzel herself.
    Rapunzel: I've spent my entire life hiding from people who would use me for my power— when I should have been hiding from you!
• In Turning Red, Ming projects her feelings about the red panda transformation onto Mei which motivates Ming to treat Mei like she's been Blessed with Suck since that was Ming's experience with it.

Films — Live Action

• In 12 Angry Men, the defendant is accused of killing his own father, and Juror 3 is absolutely certain that he's guilty. When this is challenged, he goes on a rant about the pain of an ungrateful child who turns on you despite everything you've done for him. It becomes painfully evident that he's actually reacting to the pain of his strained relationship with his own son. When 3 realizes what he's doing, he breaks down into tears and changes his verdict to not guilty.
• In Boyhood, Olivia tends to project her own flaws onto her daughter Samantha, angrily lecturing her for having a "bullshit attitude" and her selfishness, two things that apply to Olivia herself and she tends to ignore the fact that she consistently shows more preference to Mason Jr. Samantha even calls her out on it.
• The Dark Knight: In the climax, the Joker subjects two ferries — one carrying civilians, the other carrying inmates — to a "social experiment"; both boats have a detonator that will set off explosives on the other ferry. The first ferry to blow up the other will live. Ultimately, the passengers of both ferries cannot bring themselves to kill the other to save their lives much to the Joker's shock. This leads to Batman saying this:
  What were you trying to prove? That deep down, everyone's as ugly as you? You're alone!
• In Don't Worry Darling, once it is revealed that the Victory project is really an elaborate virtual reality simulation, Jack tries to defend himself by arguing that Alice was unhappy in the real world and he did all this for her sake. The most charitable interpretation of this argument is that Jack assumed Alice was unhappy with their real lives because he was unhappy, but this ignores the fact that Alice was only so stressed and tired because she had to work long hours at the hospital. She mainly did this because Jack didn't have a job and still expected her to do everything for him, and she otherwise seemed content and even proud of her work at the hospital. Frankly, if anything in their real lives was making Alice unhappy, it was Jack himself.
• In The Frighteners, Agent Dammers claims that Frank's efforts are all based around his own pathetic need for self-gratification, Dammers' mental issues and Wrong Genre Savvy leaving him incapable of acknowledging that Frank is genuinely trying to stop a killer ghost, as opposed to Dammers' belief that Frank is a killer psychic.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): The novelization and a filmed deleted scene show that Emma tried to estrange Madison from Mark by lying to her about why he left them: he reduced himself to a drunk and a Titan-hating bigot after Andrew's death and abandoned them because he didn't love them anymore. Emma is bitter about Mark leaving her and Madison when they needed him most, seeing Mark as the only one at fault for their Grief-Induced Split. Emma argues that she kept herself together for Madison's sake while Mark didn't, though her Sanity Slippage proves otherwise, and she refuses to see that she also played a role in the divorce. Emma tells Madison that Mark gave up on them, but Madison calls her out for being the one who gave up since she gave up on humanity after losing Andrew.
• In Irreconcilable Differences, Lucy tells Casey at her emancipation trial, "I know why you want to divorce your father. I know you never got over his abandoning us." Casey replies, "No, Mom, you never got over his abandoning us."
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • The Avengers: Loki's default mode in the film.
    • He gives the crowd of Germans a lecture on how the mad scramble for power and identity diminishes their life's joy, something he is reluctant to admit about himself.
    • He refers to Bruce Banner/Hulk as a "mindless beast" that "makes play he's still a man," asks how desperate Nick Fury is to summon "such lost creatures" to defend him and constantly taunts Banner with looks. When Black Widow calls Loki a monster he just replies "No, you've brought the monster." In Thor, Loki called himself a monster after finding out his true parentage, and in Thor: The Dark World he says that Thor must be truly desperate to come to him for help.
    • During his speech to Black Widow, he's as much talking about himself as he's talking about her. Bonus points for showing his own reflection in the glass that separates them:
      Loki: Your ledger is dripping, it's gushing red. [...] You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code, something that makes up for the horrors. But they are a part of you, and they will never go away!
  • And again in Thor: The Dark World, where he warns Thor about potentially losing Jane, while he himself is still mourning their mother's death:
    Loki: You'll never be ready! The only woman whose love you prized will be snatched from you!
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, the High Evolutionary has a raging Inferiority Superiority Complex. He vents this by abusing and killing his creations because their imperfections remind him of his own flaws.
• In What About Bob?, Dr. Marvin tells Dr. Tomsky, "You've been duped by a textbook narcissist, a brilliant sociopath!", right after trying to get Bob admitted to a mental hospital on false pretenses.

Literature

• This trope forms a central criticism surrounding Magsarion in Avesta of Black and White. The younger brother of the great hero Varhman, following his death, now has everyone saddling him with being their beacon of hope and constantly project their assumptions onto him. He is left to reject all that his brother was just to try and be his own person, and yet people around him keep ignoring his true self, constantly assuming they know all about him and what he is thinking when nothing could be further from the truth. This in turn only ends up fueling his hatred.
• A Certain Magical Index: Kakeru Kamisato absolutely hates suddenly gaining a superpower and being compelled to use it to save people. He believes it to be a curse and tries to become normal again by attacking the beings he believes are responsible for empowering him. When he learns of Touma Kamijou and his similar ability, he automatically assumes Touma feels the same way and tries to get him to join forces in his goal, and is thrown for a loop when Touma explains that powers or no powers, he's all about saving and protecting people.
• Everything I Never Told You deals with this trope via how the Lee family treat each other. They all constantly project their own issues onto each other instead of communicating about their feelings. For instance, Lydia is the favorite child because James and Marilyn project their hopes and dreams onto her — popularity for James and academic success for Marilyn and remain oblivious to the fact that Lydia is only trying to live up to their expectations to make her parents happy, not because she wants to herself. Meanwhile James and Nath have a very tense relationship because James sees himself as a boy in Nath and resents him for being weak and nerdy like he was. Only Hannah is exempt from this and that's only because her family never pay any attention to her. Outside the family, Nath's animosity towards Jack is that he perceives Jack's behavior towards him as being mockery when it's actually his own insecurity leading him to jump to assume the worst in his classmate and he's totally unaware Jack had a crush on him for a very long time and used his friendship with Lydia as an excuse to get closer to Nath.
• Harry Potter: Snape's attitude towards Harry is part this, part Sins of the Father, as he and Harry's father James hated each other from day one. Thing is, from what we see of Snape's past it's easy to spot that the two were no different from each other while at school, and arguably Snape was the worse of the two given that he loved to dabble with The Dark Arts while James firmly refused them, even saving Snape from a prank from Sirius that could have killed him. The fact that Snape loved Lily but she ultimately married James because he eventually cleaned up his act lends credence to Snape not only projecting James' bad traits on Harry, but also his own, given that James eventually grew out of them while Snape didn't.
• Katniss tends to do this a lot in The Hunger Games. For example, in Catching Fire, she insists that the other Tributes are out to get her and Peeta and that they cannot be trusted… but the first thing Katniss does upon entering the Arena is try to kill the other Tributes and she plots about backstabbing them several times, with the justification that it's to save Peeta.
• Hurog: The villainous characters are very prone to this. Ward's father regularly beat him, so violently that Ward took some brain damage (he still speaks very slowly) and decided to exaggerate it by Obfuscating Stupidity. There was no sensible reason to attack Ward, but the father had offed his own father for Klingon Promotion, and was now afraid Ward would do the same. Then there is king Jakoven, who is a chronic murderer of innocent people, which is, hilariously enough, caused by his paranoia about others planning things against him. (In part. It's safe to assume he's a jerk, too) Each and every villain assumes that Ward would kill his whole family to inherit castle Hurog. While Ward does want to inherit Hurog very much, he would never kill his family over it, but as the villains themselves would, of course, do it, it is "obvious" to them that, of course, that must be what he is planning.
• Judge Dee: The father of a newly-married woman comes barging into the tribunal to vociferously accuse the father of the groom of having abducted his daughter for his own obscene ends. It's a clue that the man has... issues... with his daughter, and his status as the Big Bad is not much of a surprise.
• The Lord of the Rings: A big part of the reason the plan to destroy the Ring ultimately works is because Sauron is so arrogant and cynical that he projects his own lust for power onto everyone else. He doesn't bother setting any sort of guard around Mount Doom nor watching it closely, despite it being the only thing that can destroy the One Ring (and him by extension) simply because he doesn't even consider the possibility someone would want to destroy it, believing the only reason someone would carry it is to try and use its power for themselves. And when he turns Denethor against the Fellowship by hinting Gandalf simply wants to conquer Middle Earth himself, the narration notes that it isn't a mere lie to cause division; Sauron genuinely believes it to be true.
• Northanger Abbey: Sheltered, kind-hearted Catherine Morland generally projects her own honest nature onto others, never thinking that someone could be manipulating her. While this causes her quite a bit of trouble in society, it is also what endears her to her love interest, Henry, who admires her guilelessness in comparison to his own greedy, domineering father.
• The Rising of the Shield Hero:
  • One bad experience after another with the royal family members, King Aultcray and Princess Malty, leads the titular hero, Naofumi, initially projecting his feelings of animosity onto the second princess Melty, immediately thinking she was untrustworthy and was secretly planning to set him up, due to being related to Aultcray and Malty, the two who placed a False Rape Accusation on him and continued to dog his steps. This is despite Melty presenting herself as a genuinely kind-hearted princess when they first met, and even personally intervening to prevent Malty and Motoyasu from forcing Naofumi to fight a duel with the latter in the middle of a public area just moments prior. Naofumi does eventually realize his mistake and now sees her a sa trusted ally and friend.
  • Aultcray himself projects his Irrational Hatred of the Shield Hero in general and his hatred of demi-humans onto Naofumi, which led to him to try and ruin the latter's life and reputation as much as possible. Not helping was the King's eldest daughter manipulating him into continuously making life hard for the new Shield Hero. This, as well as his incompetence in watching over Melromarc, catch up to him when his wife Queen Mirelia strips him and Malty of their royal status and allows Naofumi to legally change their names to "Trash" and "Bitch" respectively.
• Grand Inquisitor Zhaspahr Clyntahn of Safehold tends to project his own Evil Can Not Comprehend Good mentality on others. His second in command, Wyllym Rayno, even lampshades the act as projection when Clyntahn describes the Church's Captain-General as a weak-willed coward, jumping at shadows and wanting to pull his troops back to safety immediately after Rayno recognizes that Clyntahn, at least subconsciously, fears the Church will lose the war. Church Treasurer Rhobair Duchairn notes much the same when Clyntahn proclaims, without irony, that "men who've sold their souls have every reason to murder true servants of God and then lie about their victims to justify their bloody actions."
• The Stormlight Archive: Sadeas assumes that everyone is secretly as bloodthirsty and manipulative as he is, just that they try to hide it because he's better at the game than they are. This leads to him getting blindsided several times; at the end of the second book, he tells Adolin about his plans to kill Adolin's father, assuming that they'll wage a bloody civil war for a few years and eventually become staunch allies. But they're alone with no witnesses at the time, so Adolin just kills him on the spot.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: The Lannisters do this a lot.
  • Tywin married for love, and yet demands his children enter into loveless unions to suit his own family ambitions. He hates his son Tyrion for frequenting prostitutes which is something he is equally guilty of.
  • Jaime and Cersei both call each other a "golden fool". In both cases it's true, but neither recognizes it equally in themselves.
  • Let's look at the way Tyrion describes Cersei: "And she is greedy. Greedy for power, for honor, for love." This is an accurate characterization of Cersei — but it's also an equally accurate a characterization of himself.
• In Sword Art Online, Kyouji Shinkawa admired his older brother for his ability to kill while he was trapped in SAO. He projects his adulation onto his crush Shino Asada, due to her own past as a killer, despite knowing the fact that she hates being labeled as a killer. When she was younger, she had to kill a bank robber in self-defense, and has regretted it ever since.

Live-Action TV

• Khofit, a contestant on the second season of the Israeli Beauty and the Geek had a pet pug she would obviously project her negative emotions on. In a particular low point, when the local satire show Eretz Nehederet featured an impression of her and her dog in one of their skits, she said she wasn't insulted, but her pug was insulted because the pug used in the skit was fat.
• CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: In the episode "Genetic Disorder", the Victim of the Week is found in the bedroom of coroner Al Robbins while his wife is in the house. Drawing on his own experience of cheating and divorce, Brass assumes that the wife is having an affair and disregards any of the conflicting evidence until the very end. When the truth becomes apparent, Brass apologizes to Robbins personally for seeing his marriage in Robbins and letting that cloud his judgement.
• Homicide: Life on the Street:
  • In one episode, Bolander and Munch investigate the murder of a man by his wife. Bolander clearly sympathizes with the woman because he projects his own unhappy marriage onto her and ignores her guilt, until Munch convinces him to view the situation objectively and arrest her.
  • A tragic example occurs with Bayliss. He admits he takes cases involving child abuse (particularly sexual abuse) so personally because he sees himself in every abused child, as he was molested by his uncle throughout his childhood and had an emotionally abusive childhood.
• In Loki, this is Loki's default psychological defence, just like in The Avengers:
  • He states that for most people "choice breeds shame and uncertainty and regret", because others always take wrong paths. When Mobius asks if Loki is an exemption from this rule, Loki insults Mobius to avoid answering the question.
  • When he watches a video of his supposed death in Avengers: Infinity War, it looks like his future self is saying "you will never be a god" to the Variant Loki rather than to Thanos. The worst insult Loki tossed at Thanos when he died was the thing he himself feared the most.
  • He initially accuses the TVA of being a fraud, the weak who claim divinity and who've conjured a cruel elaborate trick to control others through fear. After seeing the recording of the future events of his life and his eventual death, the disillusioned and broken Loki repeats this diatribe word for word, but now he is referring to himself.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Sauron sees himself in Galadriel, as the dark to her light and vice versa. Galadriel confesses how betrayed she felt by people close to her who could no longer distinguish her from the very dark she was fighting. True to his nature, he is deceiving, but he does empathize with Galadriel because he felt the same after Morgoth's defeat and Adar's betrayal. He assumes that Galadriel is like him; attracted to his darkness as he is attracted to her light, resulting in him asking her to rule Middle-earth by his side. Sauron gets her attention when he tells her that he's the only one who sees her greatness, when everybody else is doubting her.
• Lucifer (2016): A Running Gag throughout the series is that whenever the titular character gets psychological advice from his therapist, he finds a way to shift the blame for what she's describing onto pretty much whomever he's angry at that week.
• In Squid Game, Sang-woo's You Should Have Died Instead speech at Player 069 who was begging the remaining players to call a vote to go home after the death of his wife Player 070 appears to be this. He rants to Player 069 that they all knew there would be deaths and going home now would not bring the eliminated players back or allow the survivors to atone for their actions. If his wife mattered so much to him, he should have chosen his fate in the previous game rather than sacrifice hers. Sang-woo is all but screaming his own guilt about tricking and betraying Ali and leaving him to die in the last game.
• Superman & Lois: Lucy Lane continually insists that her problem with Lois is how her sister refuses to admit that she's wrong, when in reality this is Lucy's main problem, blaming others for her mistakes rather than just admit that she followed the wrong person (cult leader Ally Alston).
• Tiger King: Jeff Lowe describes his first meeting with Joe Exotic as the latter sizing up "his next victim". While Joe did value his association with Jeff simply for what he assumed Jeff was worth financially, given Jeff's own status as a very skilled Con Man who later took over the zoo entirely, this was probably going through his own mind at the time as well. In the aftershow, he also mocks James Garretson for being a Fat Bastard (jokingly calling him a "sexy man") despite being an unattractive Dirty Old Man himself who's very insecure about his own baldness.
• The White Lotus: After Rachel leaves him, Shane angrily calls her a baby. She firmly retorts that he's the real baby, being coddled by his mother and throwing a fit over being put in the wrong room, despite getting an equally good one.

Music

• Could be the point of these lines in Voltaire's "Future Ex Girlfriend":
  "And no-one cares that you love Keanu
  Oh, what's the difference anyway,
  Everybody knows he's gay
  Oh, all right, I don't really know that,
  But let's face it, he's too hot to be straight."

Newspaper Comics

• Several of Calvin's schemes for bugging Susie rely on the assumption she is as obsessed with bugging him as he is her, and not understanding that she really could not care less. Unsurprisingly, they usually fail.
  Hobbes: Maybe she wasn't paying attention to us.
  Calvin: That's inconceivable! Who wouldn't be interested in everything we do?!

Roleplay

• In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Benedict has internalized all of his father's abuse under layers and layers of lies, and as a result doesn't believe that anyone else is truthful either.

Tabletop Games

• On Dark Sun, halflings distrust all other races, accusing them of always planning to kill and eat the halflings if they see them as vulnerable. This is stated to be because that's exactly what the halflings would do if the situations were reversed. For added irony, despite the Crapsack World that Athas is, the halflings are the only race that habitually practice cannibalism. The one other race with a propensity for it, the thri-kreen, consider it a literal last resort, ranking sapient flesh as just barely above carrion and the flesh of other thri-kreen.^note They do enjoy elf-flesh a lot more, but that's because of an unfortunate biological quirk; elf fear pheromones make elf-flesh unusually tasty.

Toys

• This is what the viewer is supposed to do when watching Hello Kitty. Without a mouth, the viewer can project their own feelings upon Kitty.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Miles Edgeworth assumes that every defendant in court is guilty and cannot be trusted because he believes that he himself is guilty of accidentally killing his father as a child and is now a Karma Houdini; he prosecutes others so harshly because he imagines that they're in the same situation he was. He gets over it after Phoenix proves that he was innocent all along, and Manfred von Karma was the real killer.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations, the reason Godot is a Jerkass to Phoenix only is because he blames Phoenix for failing to protect his mentor Mia (despite Phoenix bringing the true culprit to justice). Godot actually blames himself for the same, as he was in a coma when Mia was killed, but he doesn't actually admit that to himself until late in the game.
• In act III of Doki Doki Literature Club!, Monika begins talking about the yandere archetype. She mentions that it seems to describe one of the members of the club...that being Yuri, who became violently obsessive over the protagonist in the previous act. However, Yuri only harms herself, so her yandere status is debatable; whereas Monika, the real yandere of the game, has "deleted" all other members by this point, and is both extremely narcissistic and extremely jealous over the player.
• In Fate/stay night, Kirei Kotomine is a Reluctant Psycho constantly torn between his enjoyment of causing suffering and his strong moral convictions. In his search for a kindred spirit, he believed that Kiritsugu Emiya might be the same as him, but was disappointed to find they were not alike. In the "Heaven's Feel" route, Kirei begins projecting onto the nascent Angra Mainyu instead. He resolves to ensure its birth so he can see whether a being whose very existence is evil will intellectually approve of being evil.

Web Animation

• Red vs. Blue: Locus tends to assume that people he feels are similar to him have a similar 'Just Following Orders' thought process. Agent Washington regrets that period of his life, Sigma (and by extension, the Meta) wanted to Become a Real Boy instead of becoming a weapon, and Agent Maine before Sigma drove him mad followed orders because he believed they served the greater good; he felt that following orders blindly would make him a slave instead of a soldier. Wash eventually catches on and bluntly spells out that Locus's projection is just an excuse to not confront the guilt for everything he's done.
• RWBY: Adam Taurus projects quite a few of his own character flaws onto Blake. He accuses her of cowardice, but he abandoned his own men at Haven Academy to be arrested while he escaped; the White Fang turned on him for doing that. He also calls her selfish, but he is the one determined to stalk her across the continent just to drag her back to his side regardless of what she wants. Blake calls him delusional.

Webcomics

• In Ask Frisk and Company, when the AFAC version of Chara meets the Chara from Ask Drunk Chara, they immediately accuse their counterpart of trying to run away from their problems. Drunk Chara is actually The Atoner who is trying to make up for his actions by being a better person than he was during the Genocide Run, while AFAC!Chara is trying to destroy the world largely because they don't want to confront the fact that their Genocide Run was entirely their own fault (and can't be blamed on humanity being inherently evil or something else like that). When askers point this fact out, AFAC!Chara has a Villainous Breakdown, which culminates in a Despair Event Horizon.
• Projection very strongly colours how Magus of El Goonish Shive views Ellen. Ellen is an Opposite-Sex Clone of Elliot who shares all of his memories up to the point of her creation. Magus is an alternate universe version of Ellen who happens to be a trans-man. As such, Magus assumes incorrectly that Ellen must identify as male.
• In Shifty Look's Katamari, Ace constantly accuses the Prince of taking all the credit and being a total glory hound who can't stand not being the center of attention. In reality, Ace is the one who's completely desperate for attention, and is so self-centered that his response to finding out that one of his cousins needs his help is "What's in it for me?"
• Nebula: Mercury immediately jumps to the conclusion that Sun's as angry as he is at the idiocy of the other planets as soon as Sun mentions feeling weird around them, and starts to rant about their faults until Sun cuts him off and says that no, that's really not what he was going to say.
• Paranatural:
  • Forge goes on a long rant to Spender about how Spender's Well-Intentioned Extremist tendencies will cause nothing but pain for everyone around him. While Spender is a Well-Intentioned Extremist, it's blatantly obvious that Forge is projecting; he's yelling at Spender for Spender leaving his kids in danger—even though the only reason they're in danger is because Forge damaged their vehicle without considering the consequences.
    Spender: Maybe some forethought then would have prevented the problem you're so keen to make my responsibility.
  • Projecting is a very common theme throughout the series. The villains are the worst about it, but even the main characters tend to assume people share their flaws—and then lash out at someone they perceive as being too similar to themselves. Max calls this "projectance"... and so does everyone else.
• Sluggy Freelance: Gwynn thinks Torg is out to get her and can't be trusted not to do and say nasty things behind her back. That only describes herself in respect to him — really he thinks highly of her and would never be intentionally malicious (unintentionally is another matter). On the other side of the coin, Torg thinks their fighting is not serious — which would only be true if she could take it as well as he can.
• xkcd: "Projecting" does it in a meta way: "Like a lot of you, I have a real problem with projection."

Web Original

• The Onion has an article where everyone in a Dysfunctional Family projects their insecurities on the family dog.
• Rats SMP: Upon being advised to carve a scarier design for his pumpkin to ward off a spirit in the Halloween Episode, Owen redesigns it to the scariest thing he can think of — a clock. Martyn and Apo immediately interpret it as "ageing" and the passage of time, which Owen goes along with whenever someone questions if him living in a broken grandfather clock while being scared of them would constitute as hypocrisy. In truth, the reason he's so afraid of clocks in the first place is that he lost his tail to one in a tinkering accident in the past.

Real Life

• There's a Spanish proverb, "cree el ladrón que todos son de su condición", that translates to "the thief believes everyone is like him".
• Hell, the whole point of the Audience Surrogate is this trope.
• Fandom Rivalry often takes form in this, especially when particularly toxic parts of a fandom get involved and Fan Hater is invoked. It's not uncommon for people to complain and accuse the fans of the rival work of the very same things they themselves do, even in the same breath, and never see the irony of their accusations.
  • A similar thing happens with Ship-to-Ship Combat between factions of the same fandom.
• Common romantic advice: 9 times out of 10, the partner who's overly concerned with your faithfulness to the relationship is the one cheating on you.
• Another common bit of advice: If you run into an asshole in the morning, they're the asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.
• If one has interacted with people with extreme bigotry, it's easy to notice this as a means used to morally justify their views. To them, their bigotry is justified because the people they're bigoted against (IE, another race, gender, sexual identity, etc.) are the real bigoted ones, so it's completely OK to vote against them having rights and hate them. They also assume that moderates and people in their group who aren't bigoted are just lying and secretly, everyone hates the other side and are just being too polite/cowardly to admit it. The idea of not being racist/sexist/homophobic/etc. is completely alien to them, so they simply don't believe that there are people who genuinely believe in equality.
• Many stereotypes developed by racists toward marginalized groups (particularly black people) come across as this. Minorities have been accused by bigots of being lazy (when colonization was built on slave labor) and violent (as if, once again, colonization didn't involve massacres of large numbers of natives of whatever nation the colonials had landed on).
• When Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Russia in 1941, the Red Army's dispositions could not have been more ideal: instead of withdrawing his forces inward and forcing the Germans to attenuate their supply lines and risk being caught in the winter (similar to how Napoleon's invasion failed), Josef Stalin left large contingents of troops garrisoning the Eastern European territories (in Poland, Finland, and the Baltics) which had been ceded to Russia by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. As a result, the Germans were able to drive straight through the Soviets' defenses and envelop and capture huge numbers of Soviet troops before advancing into the Russian interior. Historians later theorized that Stalin, having won the territories from Nazi Germany, assumed that Adolf Hitler would focus on recapturing them since that was what Stalin would do in Hitler's place.
• Whenever the Chinese Communist Party are faced with any criticism or protests for their aggressive actions, they come across as this, chief among them; they accuse the United States and Western nations for destabilizing peace and provoking trouble, and for fostering a Cold War mentality (when the CCP are aggressively expanding their territories, continuously antagonizing neighboring nations, harassing Taiwan through show of force and their desire to invade it, and their attempts to undermine Western nations), and view the Philippines as troublemakers for asserting their rights for South China Sea/Sea of Asia (when the CCP are harassing and bullying Filipino [and their fellow Southeast Asian] fishermen, spraying water cannons and blinding ships with their laser sights, and attempting to ram them, which they did... thrice).

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