You are sitting in a café when you notice someone at the next table. They are checking their phone, glancing at the door and occasionally smiling. Within seconds, your mind may have created a possible explanation: perhaps they are waiting for someone they love, preparing for an important meeting or meeting an old friend. You know none of this is necessarily true, yet your brain can effortlessly construct an entire story around a stranger. Psychology suggests that this kind of spontaneous storytelling can be connected to social cognition, mentalizing and spontaneous thought, cognitive processes that allow people to imagine other people's intentions, emotions, goals and experiences. Researchers describe mentalizing as the ability to think about other people's mental states, while research on spontaneous thought suggests that the mind regularly generates internally created scenarios even when there is no immediate task requiring it.
