Human behavior is routinely explained through the vocabularies of cognitive appraisal, emotion, learned habit, or environmental contingency, yet the systemic organization of the automatic response pathway itself (the substrate sitting between perception and behavioral expression) is rarely treated as a unit of analysis in its own right. This paper introduces Automatic Response Configuration Theory (ARCT), an integrative theoretical framework proposing that human responses emerge from dynamically organized "response configurations" situated within a broader, persistent response architecture. These configurations vary along two foundational, static properties: configurability (the capacity to reorganize under contextual demands) and rigidity (the resistance to adaptive restructuring once activated). Together, these properties determine the probability, persistence, and flexibility of subsequent behavioral outcomes. By resolving key sequencing and structural inconsistencies found in early formulations of this theory, we present an elegant, domain-general cognitive architecture. Specifically, we eliminate circular conceptual dependencies by defining static properties before introducing the dynamic changes associated with Response Continuum Deconfiguration (RCD), a proposed mechanism of systemic change distinct from suppression, avoidance, or cognitive replacement, and distinct at a more fundamental level from classical stimulus-response accounts and from traditional connection-breaking models of behavior change: a response configuration is treated as an organized intermediary with its own structural properties rather than a strengthened stimulus-response bond, and RCD targets the point at which a configuration first forms rather than a connection it later expresses. Furthermore, we establish a precise mechanistic mapping of these properties within a foundational 7-stage cognitive pipeline, explicitly anchoring configurability and rigidity at specific transition boundaries. Finally, we resolve the epistemological tension regarding domain invariance by standardizing the framework's operational signatures into a unified 2 X 2 parameter matrix reported alongside, rather than in place of, each domain's surface content — so that the domain-general architectural claim remains checkable against the concrete behavioral differences it is meant to explain, rather than asserted independently of them. ARCT is positioned as an integrative, structurally invariant level of description. We review the relevant empirical literatures on automaticity and dual-process cognition, habit neuroscience, mindfulness-based emotion regulation, addiction and cue-reactivity, executive function and procrastination, and acute stress and cognitive flexibility to motivate ARCT's constructs. Ultimately, we model stress reactivity, anger, craving, rumination, procrastination, and decision-making as structurally analogous expressions of a single underlying architecture, opening new avenues for transdiagnostic measurement and clinical intervention. ARCT is explicitly presented as a conceptual framework requiring empirical validation, not as an established or tested theory.