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The psychology of social life is vastly complex, supported by innumerable processes that allow us to, among other things, recognize the people around us, recall memories about them, experience feelings toward them, and interact with them. If all of these processes required conscious control, no individual would be able to participate in the social world. Fortunately, many are automatic, initiated by the presence of social stimuli and completed with little conscious intervention (Bargh & Williams, 2006; Lieberman, Gaunt, Gilbert, & Trope, 2002; Smith & DeCoster, 2000). One particularly important social stimulus is an action performed by another person. Two neuro-cognitive systems are associated with action understanding in humans: the mirror neuron system and the mentalizing system. The study reported here examined the relative automaticity of these systems ’ operation during action observation. The human mirror neuron system comprises areas of the brain that activate during both the execution and the observation of motor actions. It is typically localized to ventral premotor cortex (vPMC), dorsal premotor cortex (dPMC), and anterior intraparietal sulcus (aIPS; Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004; Van Overwalle & Baetens, 2009). These regions are thought to enable the automatic comprehension of action on the basis of sensory information alone (Coricelli, 2005; Iacoboni et al.