ArticleNature human behaviour2026
Mentalizing and heuristics as distinct cognitive strategies in human teaching.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Teaching is a foundational social behaviour that can result from mentally effortful reasoning or cognitively frugal heuristics. When do people use these strategies to teach? Here we investigated this using behavioural experiments and computational modelling with adult participants recruited via Prolific. Experiment 1 (N = 100) revealed robust individual differences: some participants taught by reasoning about a learner's knowledge, consistent with an optimal Bayesian pedagogy model, while others relied on simple heuristics that do not require mentalizing. In two preregistered follow-up experiments, we found that people persist in using heuristics even when they are no longer effective (experiment 2, N = 253, P < 0.001, rank-biserial r = 0.287, 95% confidence interval 0.149-0.419) but that this tendency is pre-empted when inference about a learner's knowledge is scaffolded using an auxiliary task (experiment 3, N = 759, P < 0.001, partial
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