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 well as infer their emotional states. However, little is known about whether these abilities are related. 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 were consistent with these results by showing that all three tasks share a common component. We also examined participants’ confidence in their judgments and found that they are unaware of how good they are in predicting others’ actions. Taken together, our findings suggest shared variance across diverse forms of social prediction, while also highlighting a disconnect between task-level confidence and objective accuracy.