"I know what that was about"

The belief under the whole habit is that you can read motives from acts. The colleague talked over you, so the colleague wanted to talk over you. The email had no greeting, so the sender chose to be cold. It seems like the plainest reading. The act is there, you saw it, and acts come from people.

Daniel Gilbert and Patrick Malone reviewed thirty years of work on this in 1995 and called it the correspondence bias. It's the tendency to infer someone's lasting character from behaviour that the situation fully explains. If you're told a person was assigned to argue a position, you still tend to believe they hold it. If someone is rude in a queue, you conclude they're rude, not that they've had a morning. The bias is one of the most reliable findings in social psychology, and Gilbert and Malone describe four ways it happens. You may not be aware of the situation at all. You may have unrealistic ideas about how people behave in it. You may see the behaviour as more extreme than it was because you've already categorised it. And you may start to correct for the situation and stop early, because correcting takes effort and the first answer was already there.

That last one is the interesting one for a book about a habit. The charge isn't the end of thinking. It's the start of thinking, cut short. Your mind produces "they don't rate me", begins to adjust for the fact that they're in the middle of a house move, and gives up halfway because the adjustment is work and the charge is finished. That's why the charge feels like a conclusion. It's the only complete sentence in the room.

You can test this on any slip. Take the interruption and list what would have to be true of the colleague's situation for it to mean nothing about you. They didn't hear you start. They thought you'd finished. They'd been waiting to say something for ten minutes and had stopped tracking who was speaking. The meeting was running over and they were watching the clock. None of those are exotic. All of them are things you've done. And every one of them was available to your mind on Thursday and got dropped because "they don't rate me" was already sitting there, complete.