Liberman, N., &Trope, Y. (2008). The psychology of transcending the here and now. Science, 322(5905), 1201-1205.
People directly experience only themselves here and now but often consider, evaluate, and plan situations that are removed in time or space, that pertain to others' experiences, and that are hypothetical rather than real. People thus transcend the present and mentally traverse temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. We argue that this is made possible by the human capacity for abstract processing of ...