Mentalizing and heuristics as distinct cognitive strategies in human teaching

Teaching is a complex social behavior that can sometimes result from mentalizing, such as when a teacher explicitly reasons about what a learner might know and intentionally corrects gaps in their knowledge. But while teaching by mentalizing can be highly effective, it is also cognitively demanding since it requires engaging in costly mental state inference and planning. As an alternative, teachers can use more cognitively frugal heuristics. When do people engage in mentalizing versus rely on heuristics? Here, we investigated this question by combining novel behavioral experiments with computational theory. In Experiment 1, we found clear differences in individual participants’ teaching strategies: some participants’ teaching is consistent with costly mentalizing, while others’ teaching is consistent with lower-effort heuristics. In two pre-registered follow up experiments, we found that people adaptively use mentalizing versus heuristics in different environments (Experiment 2)[1] and that an intervention that scaffolds inference with an auxiliary task can increase the use of costly mentalization (Experiment 3)[2]. These results and analyses provide a novel demonstration of the complex interplay of mentalizing and heuristics in human pedagogy while providing new insight into how the avoidance of mental effort might influence human social interactions more broadly.