Negative Evaluations of Rote Teaching

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 US adults, focusing specifically on pedagogy and learning. We establish a cue for rote behavior (Exp. 1), and find that rote people are seen as worse teachers (Exp. 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 (Exp. 3). Lastly, a word-embedding analysis of an open-response task shows people naturally cluster rote and reflective teachers into different semantic categories (Exp. 4). These results are the first to empirically show that people detect and care about scripted behaviors in pedagogy, suggesting an important extension to formal frameworks of social reasoning.