Not sure someone ever unconsciously gets in the shower, and all else being equal, it’s more parsimonious to say the person wants to shower to feel better, and isn’t inventing a rationalization (Wow, I’m just really dirty today. I should shower again. This has nothing to do with the crushing loneliness I’m feeling) for self soothing behavior. Their evidence that it’s unconscious was “people don’t assume (in a statistically significant way) other people are sad because they shower”, which could be easily read to mean “people aren’t very good at theory of mind.”

Criticism aside, though, it’s interesting to think that the cognitive mechanisms might overlap. There seems to be increasing evidence that our abstract reasoning is built from the cognitive building blocks acquired by exploring the physical world as infants.