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Definition
Projective hypothesis refers to the notion that when confronted with ambiguous and unstructured stimuli, the responses elicited by a person reflect one’s unconscious needs, feelings, anxieties, motives, thoughts, conflicts, and prior behavioral conditioning.
Introduction
The concept of projective hypothesis lies behind the development of the stimuli of projective tests and also touches upon the validity-related concern for such tests. It is assumed that unstructured and ambiguous stimuli have the power to bypass both conscious suppression and unconscious defenses that might otherwise result in faked, distorted, or falsified responses. Therefore, assessment techniques using such stimuli may have the ability to unearth one’s core traits, irrespective of culture and training. Evidently, the idea is linked to the psychodynamic understanding of human behavior and specifically to the mechanism of projection.
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References
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Basu, J. (2017). Projective Hypothesis. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_64-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_64-1
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