Examples of the Mind Projection Fallacy?

Young children commit the mind projection fallacy. If you introduce a puppet figure Mary who sees that a sweet is put under box A, then take Mary away, swap the location of the sweet with Box B and then ask the children where Mary would look for the sweet, very young children tend to say it's B. Only older children realize Mary would look under Box A because she doesn't know otherwise.

A friend of mine once said that often people would be astonished how rich he must be, however, what happens is that my friend values things differently (e.g. he does not own a car which is quite unusual in Stuttgart). So when people see the high-tech gadgets he buys they think about all the other stuff that they would buy before that and then sum over that completely imagined spending.

Odd, human-centric example:

I used to think that everyone had the same favorite internal color-experience and we all just grew up calling the colors different names, blissfully unaware that your "red" is in fact my yellow, or your cousin's green. After all, how could someone NOT like my favorite color as much as I did? Clearly, they all liked purple and just grew up calling it a different color...

It's weird how I managed to both avert and run smack right into the mind projection fallacy in the same thought. I realized that everyone could, in theory, have a different internal experience and attach it to the same outer word or thing, and yet I still insisted that the "favorite" attribute was universal.

I don't believe it anymore, but I still think about the mind projection fallacy in terms of it. There really are attributes for colors that are near-universal, for humans. Red has very good reasons for being associated with passion and aggressiveness, being the color of blood. But think if my pet theory had been true, and someone else experienced it as a calm sky blue? It wouldn't BE calm for them--they'd have the same ingrained emotional reaction for it that I have for my version of red. So however much it feels like red is a passionate and aggressive color in and of itself, the passion and aggressiveness really only comes from me.

Here's one that comes to mind:

I really don't know anything about baseball, so if I'm going to bet on either the Red Socks or the Yankees, I'd have to go fifty-fifty on it. Therefore, the chance that either will win is fifty percent.

(Right at the "therefore" is the fallacy put forward as a veritable property of either of the teams winning, when in fact it is merely indicative of the ignorance of the gambler. The actual probability is most likely not 50-50.)

EDIT: Others might enjoy reading this PDF ("Probability Theory as Logic") for additional background and ideas. There you'll also see a bon mot by Montaigne: "Man is surely mad. He cannot make a worm; yet he makes Gods by the dozen."

Perception, in particular of ambiguity. The Spinning Dancer is now my favorite visual example of Mind Projection: we attribute to the world "out there" properties that are in fact only "in there".

The idea that morality is objective if it comes from a deity is a mind projection fallacy. It can take two forms:

1) For the average person, assuming that if you think following God is a good idea, and God says it is a good idea, then it must objectively be a good idea. When prodded for details of how "God says it" turns into "it is objectively right," you will find these people often have only vague and plainly incorrect ideas ("If you don't you'll go to hell" as if might makes right, "He created us" as if creators have complete moral authority over creations 100% of the time, etc.)

2) God is an all-powerful and omnipresent being, therefore, by magic, God's subjective desires become objective desires.

Either God's laws are good ideas in people's heads or they're good ideas in God's head; neither makes them "objective," and philosophers now accept that Divine Morality is a subjectivist theory of ethics.

Relatedly, the idea that something can be meaningful without a mind for it to be meaningful to. See William Lane Craig's writings on Ultimate Meaning. Nothing can be meaningful to a rock. What many theists mean when they say God gives your life ultimate meaning is that it gives meaning subjective to God. Again, if you don't care what God thinks--say you're a paperclip maximizer and the only thing you care about is making paperclips--the heaven/hell endgame won't be particularly meaningful to you.

Even in Goedel, Escher, Bach, when Hofstadter concludes that intrinsic meaning is possible in encoded messages, he downplays a bit the necessary caveat that he means it can only exist for minds like ours. If the universe had no minds, there would be no meaning.

The Labor Theory of Value is a mind projection fallacy. Value is something that can only exist in minds, and if everyone were to suddenly change their minds about that which is valuable, all the labor in the world used to produce a previously desired product wouldn't mean a thing. Marxists recognize this, which is why they talk about "socially necessary labor-time," a self-defeating addendum if there ever was one.

The whole 2012 mythos is an example: the idea that a dead pre-technological civilization had a unique ability to forecast the coming apocalypse strikes me as an obvious case of the...

(puts on sunglasses)

...Mayan Projection Fallacy.

Arguments in philosophy along the lines of "so human language has existential commitment to {possible worlds, universals, types...}, hence they exist."

anytime you see a face (or any meaning) in a natural form: animals in clouds, faces in mountains, jesus on toast. (8 years later, i know but I was here reading the responses...)

The hope function is an interesting example where it's very clear that many are not solving the problems correctly because they think the probabilities can't change.