第232页 Reporting Live from Tomorrow

Our belif in the variability of others and in the uniqueness of the self is especially powerful when it comes to emotion. Because we can feel our own emotions but must infer the emotions of others by watching their faces and listening to their voices, we often have the impression that others don't experience the same intensity of emotion that we do, which is why we expect others to recognize our feelings even when we can't recognize theirs. 
This sense of emotional uniqueness starts early. 
Our mythical belif in the variability and uniqueness of induviduals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates. After all, surrogation is only useful when we can count on a surrogate to react to an event roughly as we would, and if we believe that people's emotional reactions are more varied than they actually are, then surrogation will seem less useful to us than it actually is.
The irony, of course, is that surrogation is a cheap and effective way to predict one's future emotions, but because we don't realize just how similar we all are, we reject this reliable method and rely instead on our imaginations, as flawed and fallible as they may be.
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Like the hogwash that farmers feed their pigs, the hogwash that our friends and teachers and parents feed us is meant to make us happy; but unlike hogwash of the porcine variety, human hogwash does not always achieve its end. 
Ideas can flourish if they preserve the social systems that allow them to be transmitted. These ideas must disguise themselves as prescriptions for indivudual happiness.
Rather than calculating utilities with mathematical precision, we simply step into tomorrow's shoes and see how well they fit. Our ability to project ourselves forward in time and experience events before they happen enables us to learn from mistakes without making them and to evaluate actions without taking them. 
Foresight is a fragile talent that often leaves us squinting, straining to see what it would be like to have this, go ther,e or do that. But if our great big brains do not allow us to go surefootedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble.