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Description: A core question for the cognitive sciences concerns how we flexibly interact with others and coordinate behaviour to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. The present study aims to shed light upon the cognitive control, or regulatory systems, that shape the way we interpret and respond to social interactions. Despite a general acceptance of the importance of control mechanisms for social competence, most leading models of socio-cognitive processing devote very little discussion to the precise nature and neuroanatomical correlates of their involvement. Recently, however, it has been proposed that brain regions specialised for the controlled retrieval of semantic information, namely the anterior inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the posterior middle temporal gyrus, could play a key role in social cognition. Accordingly, the present study set out to investigate whether the distributed neural activation commonly found in social functional neuroimaging studies extends to include these ‘semantic control’ regions. To this end, we conducted five coordinate-based meta-analyses to combine the results of over 500 independent fMRI/PET experiments using the Activation Likelihood Estimation approach. We identified the neural networks reliably involved in semantic control, as well as four social abilities, including theory of mind, trait inference, empathy and moral reasoning. This allowed an unprecedented parallel review of the neural networks associated with each of these cognitive domains. The results confirmed that the anterior left IFG (pars orbitalis/ BA 47) region involved in semantic control is reliably engaged in all four of the social domains. We also observed common activation of the supplementary motor area and the right IFG in semantic control, theory of mind, trait inference and empathy. Overall, the findings suggest that social cognition could be partly regulated by a neurocognitive system specialised for the controlled retrieval of conceptual knowledge. This has important implications for models of both neurotypical and disordered social cognition.