Thornton Mark A, Tamir Diana I
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA.
Department of Psychology and Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA.
Sci Adv. 2021 Feb 26;7(9). doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abd4995. Print 2021 Feb.
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。为了与舞伴优雅地协调，人们必须预测他们的动作。在此，我们研究了人们如何预测他人的动作。我们假设人们可以基于对他人当前动作的了解以及动作转换的知识，准确预测他人未来的动作。为了测试人们是否准确了解动作之间的转换概率，我们将从四个大型自然主义数据集中计算出的实际动作转换率与参与者对相应动作集之间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，我们发现人们利用由六维ACT-FAST分类法描述的动作概念知识来指导他们的准确预测。这些结果共同表明，人们能够在社交生活的舞蹈中准确预测他人的动作，并且动作知识的结构可能是为了进行这些预测而量身定制的。
