Projecting and the Law of False Attribution
I've been meaning to write this post for more than a year now; from the beginning, I've had this particular title in mind although I'm not 100% sure that it's the right one. If anyone has a better suggestion for how to name this particular mental process, feel free to submit a comment.
I call the phenomenon I want to describe a "law" because it seems to be a fundamental principle of human mental functioning, an in-built assumption that if I am feeling bad, then someone or something is causing me to feel that way. In other words, we attribute a cause-and-effect relationship between the way we are feeling and the actions of people around us. Sometimes this attribution may be accurate -- Your continual criticisms are causing me to feel terrible -- but on other occasions, it may be false: The way you chew your food is driving me crazy! In the latter case, I am probably feeling irritable, tired and grouchy; rather than recognizing that I feel the way I do because I didn't get enough sleep last night or because work today was highly stressly, I falsely account for those feelings by attributing them to you and your irksome way of chewing.