In those texts, emotional and mental states are almost always referred to with analogs to physical sensation. 'Anger' is the heating of your head, 'fear' is the thudding of your heart. He claims that at the time, there wasn't a vocabulary that expressed abstract mental states, and so the distinction between the mind and body was not clear-cut. Then, over time, specialized terms to represent those states were invented, passed into common usage, which enabled an ability to introspect that didn't exist before.
(All examples are made up, I read it more than 20 years ago. But it made an impression.)
I would claim that most people use intuition/assumptions rather than internal chain-of-thought, when communicating, meaning they will present that simplified concept without second thought, leading to the same behavior as the toddler. It's actually trivial to find someone that doesn't use assumptions, because they take a moment to respond, using an internal chain-of-thought type consideration to give a careful answer. I would even claim that a fast response is seen as more valuable than a slow one, with a moment of silence for a response being an indication of incompetence. I know I've seen it, where some expert takes a moment to consider/compress, and people get frustrated/second guess them.