Social life is a complex dance. To coordinate gracefully with one’s partners, one must predict their actions. Here, we investigated how people predict others’ actions. We hypothesized that people can accurately predict others’ future actions based on knowledge of their current actions, coupled with knowledge of action transitions. To test whether people have accurate knowledge of the transition probabilities between actions, we compared actual rates of action transitions—calculated from four large naturalistic datasets—to participants’ ratings of the transition probabilities between corresponding sets of actions. In five preregistered studies, participants demonstrated accurate mental models of action transitions. Furthermore, we found that people drew upon conceptual knowledge of actions—described by the six-dimensional ACT-FASTaxonomy—to guide their accurate predictions. Together, these results indicate that people can accurately anticipate other people’s moves in the dance of social life and that the structure of action knowledge may be tailored to making these predictions.

社交生活是一场复杂的舞蹈。为了与合作伙伴优雅地协调，必须预测他们的行为。在这里，我们研究了人们如何预测他人的行为。我们假设人们可以根据对当前行为的了解以及对行为转换的了解来准确预测他人未来的行为。为了测试人们是否准确了解动作之间的转换概率，我们将根据四个大型自然数据集计算出的实际动作转换率与参与者对相应动作组之间的转换概率的评分进行了比较。在五项预先注册的研究中，参与者展示了动作转换的准确心理模型。此外，我们发现人们利用六维 ACT-FASTaxonomy 描述的动作概念知识来指导他们的准确预测。总之，这些结果表明，人们可以准确地预测他人在社交生活舞蹈中的动作，并且动作知识的结构可能适合做出这些预测。