The Detection of Automatic Behavior in Other People

The standard model of Theory of Mind posits that we attribute mental states to other people in order to explain their behavior. But what of cases in which we think the other person is being scripted, acting automatically with no goals or beliefs to recover? While a great deal of past work has distinguished between automatic and reflective behavior in one's own decision making, here we argue that reasoning about automatic behavior in other people is an important and largely unexplored area in research into Theory of Mind. We report results from two studies (N = 4,528 total) that examine the detection of automatic behavior in others. In Study 1, we conducted a large-scale survey characterizing the ubiquity of rote interactions in people's daily lives. In Study 2, we showed participants short video clips from a variety of domains, and found that people quickly and reliably attribute automaticity to others, and that automaticity judgements are distinct from other related behavioral attributions. On the basis of our findings, we suggest that reasoning about scripted behavior in others is an important, frequent, intuitive inference, and propose extensions to current research in intuitive psychology to study it further.