Social projection

Biological Parallel

Vampire bats that share blood meals with hungry roost-mates use a simple heuristic: if I'm hungry, others are probably hungry too. This projection works because colony members face synchronized food scarcity—if one bat failed to feed, others likely did too. Social projection—assuming others share our preferences and states—evolved as an efficient shortcut in environments where group members faced correlated challenges. The bias becomes problematic when modern diversity means others' states genuinely differ from ours, but the ancestral heuristic persists.