Teaching Without Thinking: Negative Evaluations of Rote Pedagogy

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 (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). A word-embedding analysis of an open-response task shows people naturally cluster rote and reflective teachers into different semantic categories (Exp. 4). We also show that repetitiveness can be decoupled from perceptions of rote-ness given contextual explanation (Exp. 5). Finally, we establish two additional cues to rote behavior that can be tied to quality of teaching (Exp. 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.