Suppressing a stigmatized trait causes people to project it onto others.

Evidence

Smart and Wegner (1999) demonstrated that participants who attempted to conceal stigmas were more likely to project their stigmas onto other people than those who did not attempt to conceal them. Women with eating disorders were interviewed, and some of them were asked to play the role of a person without an eating disorder. Participants in this condition were subsequently more likely than others to suspect that the interviewer had an eating disorder. In other words, having to hide or suppress aspects of themselves caused eating disordered participants to project those traits. Finally, to investigate whether projection can actually serve to distance individuals from threatening traits, Schimel, Greenberg, and Martens (2003) examined the consequences of projection for the accessibility of the projected traits. They found that individuals who had been told they had “repressed hostility” (an undesirable trait) showed decreased accessibility of this trait if given the opportunity to project it onto others. Specifically, when completing a series of word fragments, they were less likely to think of anger-related words. In addition, they rated themselves as less hostile than participants who had not been given an opportunity to project. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2358

Smart and Wegner (1999) demonstrated that participants who attempted to conceal stigmas were more likely to project their stigmas onto other people than those who did not attempt to conceal them. Women with eating disorders were interviewed, and some of them were asked to play the role of a person without an eating disorder. Participants in this condition were subsequently more likely than others to suspect that the interviewer had an eating disorder. In other words, having to hide or suppress aspects of themselves caused eating disordered participants to project those traits. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2358

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s recurring theme of suppression and amplification — parallels Wegner’s ironic process theory of thought suppression that underlies the whole chapter. — connects to: Civilized subjects project their own repressed mimetic impulses onto others as repellent remnants. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1426
• SEED: Angles for an article: concealment as a driver of out-group perception — how closeted identities distort judgments of others.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 2358; , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2358