The Impact Of Competition On Spontaneous Lies Of Preschool Children

For today's society,competition is unavoidable and ubiquitous.Competition plays an important role in economics,political science,sociology,and so on.Scholars are also increasingly concerned about the negative effects of competition.For example,studies on adults show that competition leads to more lying behavior.However,the impact of competition on preschool children's lying behavior is still unknown.This study uses an adaptation of the "Hide and seek" paradigm,select the 2-4-year-old children which was considered to be in a critical period of development of lying as research target to explore the impact of competitive training on children's lying behavior,and further explore the "Transfer Effect" of competition affect children's behavior of lying in other tasks.The experiment used single factor design,taking competition as independent variable and subject's lying behavior as dependent variable.There are two experiments in this study:Experiment 1 select honest children in "Hide and seek" game and observed the occurrence of lying after passing competitive training through six consecutive days of competition training.In Experiment 2,a transfer task was added based on Experiment 1.The purpose of this experiment was to examine whether the rate of competition among the children who are competing for training is still higher than that for children who have not been compelled to compete in the different tasks,and by this way to explore the transfer effects of competition on preschool Children of their lying behavior.The study concluded that:(1)The increase in children's competitive experience will induce 2-4 year old honest children to lie in a competitive game.(2)The increase in competition experience will make children appear lying in non-competitive games.(3)Children who have increased competition experience compared to non-competitive experiences will also have more lying behavior in subsequent migration tasks.