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When people make decisions, they act in a way that is either automatic (“rote”), or more thoughtful (“reflective”). But do people notice when others are behaving in a rote way, and do they care? We examine the detection of rote behavior and its consequences in U.S. adults, focusing specifically on pedagogy and learning. We establish repetitiveness as a cue for rote behavior (Experiment 1), and find that rote people are seen as worse teachers (Experiment 2). We also find that the more a person's feedback seems similar across groups (indicating greater rote‐ness), the more negatively their teaching is evaluated (Experiment 3). A word‐embedding analysis of an open‐response task shows people naturally cluster rote and reflective teachers into different semantic categories (Experiment 4). We also show that repetitiveness can be decoupled from perceptions of rote‐ness given contextual explanation (Experiment 5). Finally, we establish two additional cues to rote behavior that can be tied to quality of teaching (Experiment 6). These results empirically show that people detect and care about scripted behaviors in pedagogy, and suggest an important extension to formal frameworks of social reasoning.
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This content will become publicly available on November 14, 2026
The Development of Sensitivity to Automatic Behavior
People’s behavior can be roughly categorized into two modes: either reflective and thoughtful, or automatic and rote. Past work on Theory of Mind has focused on the first category. But do children notice when people are acting in an automatic way? This paper examined five- to ten-year-old children’s reasoning about others’ rote behavior, focusing on the consequences of this inference in teaching contexts (N = 660 across four studies, 327 girls). Children’s sensitivity to rote behavior increased with development, with consistent competence emerging around age 7. Rote behavior was also associated with worse teaching. These results indicate when and how reasoning about automatic behavior matters to children’s perception of others, and suggest novel extensions to models of Theory of Mind.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2327447
- PAR ID:
- 10656136
- Publisher / Repository:
- PsyArXiv
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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