Young Children’s Cheating Behavior And Its Correlates

Rules are important for building an orderly life.But the cheating behavior occurs in contexts as varied as business,sports,taxpaying,education,marriage,politics,and the practice of law.The cheating behavior is defined as a behavior that the cheater violate a prescriptive,mandatory,regulative,and conduct-governing rule in order to obtain an advantage(Green,2004).Research shows that children’s cheating behaviors begin early at the age of three.As the pre-school period is the most obvious and plastic period for children’s socialization development,it is of great significance to effectively cultivate children’s rule consciousness for their own growth and even the harmony and stability of the whole society.A few domestic and foreign studies on children’s cheating behavior show that children’s own factors,such as cognitive factors,have a certain impact on children’s violations.However,limited by the research paradigm,there is no consistent conclusion in this aspect.In view of this,this study aims to systematically investigate the cheating behaviors and their strategies of pre-school children under the paradigm of temptation resistance,as well as the influence of cognition,intelligence and other individual factors on the cheating behaviors,so as to lay a solid foundation for better exploring the development rules of children’s cheating behaviors.This study takes 3-and 5-year-old children as research objects and adopts the temptation resistance paradigm to investigate children’s cheating behaviors.In order to better meet the needs of current research,this study modified the standard paradigm of resisting temptation.In the modified model of resisting temptation,the experimenter played a game named "guessing" with the child in a quiet room,where the child had to guess correctly in two key rounds in order to win a reward.In each critical trial,the experimenter left the room for one minute.Because the probability is so small based on guesswork alone,children need to commit violations to ensure success.In this study,the cheating behavior was defined as the obvious violation of the rules(i.e.,peeking at the "standard answer" or changing one’s own wrong answer)in two key rounds within one minute after the experimenter left the room.The cheating behavior was recorded by a camera placed in a corner of the room.The investigation of individual violations in thisstudy mainly involves three aspects: first,the occurrence of cheating behavior or not;The second is the violation strategy,which is divided into the low-level strategy and the high-level strategy.The third is the occurrence of violations and the dynamic change of violation strategies in the two key rounds.The first study was designed to explore children’s cheating behavior and violation strategies under the modified paradigm of resisting temptation.Fifty three-year-old children and fifty five-year-old children from a kindergarten in Hangzhou were selected to participate in the experiment.The results showed that more than 85% of the children had committed violations in the two key rounds,and there was no significant difference between the two age groups.In terms of violation strategies,in the first key round,there was no difference in strategies;However,in the second key round,the children using the advanced strategy were significantly more than those using the low-level strategy,and further analysis showed that this "strategy upgrading" effect was mainly manifested in the three-year-old children.Study 2 further investigated the cognitive,intellectual and other individual factors that influence children’s rule-breaking behavior.Specifically,the cognitive factors examined in this study include the theory of mind,inhibition and control,moral evaluation,risk-taking tendency,counterfactual reasoning,and beliefs about other people’s violations.In addition,we also examined the influence of intelligence factors,personality traits and children’s problem behaviors.The results show that cognitive factors mainly affect the use of violation strategies in the first key round and the dynamic change of violation strategies in the two key rounds.Specifically,children with a high level of theory of mind,a high probability of perceived being caught,a low probability of perceived being punished,and a high score for belief about violations of others were more likely to use low-level strategies in the first key round.At the same time,the children with a higher tendency to take risks were more likely to make strategy upgrading in the two key rounds,that is,using low-level strategies in the first round and high-level strategies in the second round.In addition,the higher level of inhibition control and the high probability of perceived punishment,the more likely the children were to use the same violation strategy in the two key rounds.In terms of intelligence,verbal intelligenceand operational intelligence have a wide impact on children’s illegal behaviors.The differences between them are mainly reflected in the fact that operational intelligence mainly affects the selection and dynamic changes of illegal strategies in the two key rounds.Verbal intelligence mainly affects the occurrence of violations.In terms of other individual factors,creativity,curiosity,discipline and self-control in personality traits play a certain role in predicting the occurrence of children’s violation behaviors,violation strategies and the dynamic changes in the two key rounds.The above results provide a strong empirical basis for the in-depth exploration of the development mechanism of children’s cheating behavior.