Van Boven, L., & Loewenstein, G. (2003). Social projection of transient drive states. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 29(9), 1159-1168.
The authors hypothesized that people's predictions of how other people feel in emotionally arousing situations are often based on people's predictions of how they themselves would feel in those situations. Indeed, most participants in Study 1 reported predicting hungry hikers' feelings by mentally trading places with them, imagining what their own feelings would be in the hikers' situation. Because people's predictions of their own feelings ...