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。为了优雅地与伙伴协调，必须预测他们的行为。在这里，我们调查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动转换的了解来准确预测他人的未来行为。为了测试人们是否对动作之间的转换概率有准确的了解，我们将实际的动作转换率（从四个大型自然数据集计算得出）与参与者对相应动作集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，参与者展示了准确的动作转换心理模型。此外，我们发现人们利用行动的概念知识——由六维 ACT-FAStaxonomy 描述——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其他人在社交生活中的动作，并且行动知识的结构可以定制来做出这些预测。