<p>Supporting the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness has been demonstrated on numerous occasions to enhance human functioning. While most educators would not object to this empirical evidence, not all implement needs-supportive practices in everyday teaching. Is this a matter of reluctance, or a matter of their willingness to discern students’ needs? In this vignette study, we examined to what extent teachers are willing to discern when students attempt to fulfill their basic psychological needs through their behaviors. Participants were 484 teachers (80.6% female; mean age = 47.52, SD = 10.90, years) who reported their general causality orientations, empathy for students, and attributions for academic underachievement of students with physical disabilities. Teachers then read a fictional story about a complaining student with a physical disability and indicated whether the student’s complaint reflected an expression of a basic psychological need. They also reported whether they perceived the situation as ego-threatening and indicated their intentions to respond in either an autonomous-supportive or a controlling manner. Path analyses revealed that teachers with an autonomous causality orientation and external attributions for students’ underachievement due to physical disabilities were more likely to interpret student requests as implicit messages signaling unmet basic psychological needs. In contrast, teachers with a more controlled orientation and internal attributions for students’ shortcomings were more likely to disregard students’ requests, with teachers’ ego threat mediating these associations. In turn, the more teachers recognized (vs. ignored) students’ basic psychological needs, the more likely they were to respond in an autonomous-supportive (vs. controlling) way. These findings suggest that teachers’ dispositions enable them to recognize when students’ needs await to be met and, consequently, to act accordingly in the classroom.</p>