Humans felt empathy for 'pet rocks' -- we just project empathy onto the world sort in the same way that we see faces in things which don't contain faces. Quite a bit of the "normal" interaction that people do is just emotional projection. If two people are on the same wavelength, then it can really feel like you're reading them correctly. Sometimes you are, but sometimes you're just projecting onto them, and they're projecting onto you. When the topic is simple, this works easily. eg: "hey, isn't this music band great!" -- there's no need for great accuracy in a situation like that. The more complex a topic becomes, the more this falls apart.