Exploring Children’s Cheating Behavior In Competition

In current society,competition is inevitable and ubiquitous.A large amount of evidence shows that competition will not only produce many positive contributions but also result in some negative effects.One of the negative effects is that competition can make it easier for individuals to cheat.Previous study has proposed some avoidance mechanisms to avoid the possible negative effects of competition.Among them,a kind of self-competition mechanism has been put forward,which represents that students compete with themselves rather than their learning partners.In the field of education,the research of competition on immoral behavior is mainly concentrated in primary school students and above.However,studies have shown that children’s competition and cheating behavior has existed before school age.According to the study of lying,with the increase of age,more and more children lie.Affected by children’s executive function and the development of theory,the majority of children aged 5 years and beyond will deny their lying after cheating.Therefore,a "number-guessing using playing card" task in adapted "temptation resistance" paradigm was employed in the present study.We selected preschool children with an average age of 6 years old as subjects,to explore children’s cheating behavior in a certain situation of competition and further study whether the self-competition mechanism can effectively control the children’s cheating behavior and lying behavior in preschool period.The experiments adopted between-subjects design,in which different conditions are between-subjects variables and the subjects’ behavior is a dependent variable,and test the psychological theory and executive function of children who participated in the task.We carried out two experiments.The first one was conducted to investigate the occurrence of cheating in the competition with others and the possibilities that children chose to cheat in order to get the first place by "number-guessing" games in competition with others.The second experiment added the self-competition condition as well as executive functioning and theory-of-mind test,aiming to investigate if children’s cheating behavior will decrease in comparison with under competition with others so as to explore whether the self-competition mechanism can effectively control the children’s cheating behavior and lying behavior in preschool period.The results are discussed as follows:(1)For children with an average age of 6 years,the ability to resist temptation has increased.Only a small number of children in the "Guessing" game cheated.(2)In the context of competition with others,boys’ ability to resist the temptation fell and the rate of cheating increased significantly.It showed that competition could increase boys’ cheating behavior.(3)Most children chose to lie to cover up the truth after cheating.(4)Regardless of whether the child is in a competitive situation,his or her dishonesty or honesty were not affected.(5)Compared with the competitive situation of others,in the self-competition situation,children’s cheating behavior significantly reduced.