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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. 

Pedagogy is a powerful way to learn about the world, and young children are adept at both learning from teaching and teaching others themselves. Theoretical accounts of pedagogical reasoning suggest that an important aspect of being an effective teacher is considering what learners need to know, as misconceptions about learners' beliefs, needs, or goals can result in less helpful teaching. One underexplored way in which teachers may fail to represent what learners know is by simply “going through the motions” of teaching, without actively engaging with the learner's beliefs, needs, and goals at all. In the current paper, we replicate ongoing work that suggests children are sensitive to when others are relying on automatic scripts in the context of teaching. We then look at the potential link to two related measures. First, we hypothesize that sensitivity to a teacher's perceived automaticity will be linked to classic measures of pedagogical sensitivity and learning—specifically, how children explore and learn about novel toys following pedagogical vs. non-pedagogical demonstrations. Second, we hypothesize that the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) (and age differences more broadly) relate to these pedagogical sensitivities. Our online adaptation of the novel toy exploration task did not invoke pedagogical reasoning as expected, and so we do not find robust links between these tasks. We do find that ToM predicts children's ability to detect automaticity in teaching when controlling for age. This work thus highlights the connections between sensitivity to teaching and reasoning about others' knowledge, with implications for the factors that support children's ability to teach others. 

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.