Shared Cognitive Component of Predicting Others’ Actions and Action Outcomes as well as Inferring Emotions

It is well known that individuals can predict others’ actions and their action outcomes, as wellas infer their emotional states. However, previous research remained silent about whether these predictive abilities rely on shared cognitive mechanisms. In a highly powered and preregistered study, we investigated whether the ability to predict in social settings is related across different modalities by comparing participants’ performance of predicting others’ actions and action outcomes as well as inferring emotional states. The results indicate that performance on all three tasks is moderately correlated. Principal component analyses underscore these results by showing that all three tasks share a common component. We also examined participants’ confidence in their judgments and found that participants are unaware of how good they are in predicting others’ actions. Taken together, our findings suggest a shared cognitive basis for diverse forms of social prediction, while also highlighting a disconnect between subjective confidence and objective accuracy.