Humans automatically attribute minds to almost everything, sometimes wrongly

Epley opens with evidence that the human brain is wired to detect and infer minds constantly and automatically, a capacity so strong that people readily attribute intentions, emotions, and personalities to non-human things — cars, computers, pets, even simple geometric shapes moving on a screen in classic psychology experiments. This overactive mind-detection likely evolved because correctly inferring another creature's intentions, especially predators or rivals, carried enormous survival value.

The same system, however, misfires constantly in the modern world, leading people to anthropomorphize gadgets, become emotionally attached to robots, or assume malicious intent behind a computer glitch. Epley treats this not as a quirky bias but as a revealing window into how central mind-attribution is to human cognition generally — we can't easily turn it off, even when we know intellectually that a Roomba has no feelings.

Takeaway: our drive to see minds everywhere is a feature of how human cognition works, not a rare error — expect it to misfire regularly, especially with technology.