I may have done a poor job of conveying why the story is related to Cargo Cult religions. The term cargo cult programmer may also apply when an unskilled or no

I may have done a poor job of conveying why the story is related to Cargo Cult religions. The term cargo cult programmer may also apply when an unskilled or novice computer programmer (or one not experienced with the problem at hand) copies some program code from one place and pastes it into another place, with little or no understanding of how the code works, or whether it is required in its new position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming I don’t know if this term can be applied to Alice, but I am pretty certain that the story describes Ted blindly copying the surface form of something Bob did in an interview with Carol into Ted’s interview with Alice with little or no understanding of how Bob's conversation worked, or whether it was required in Ted’s conversation with Alice.