The Relationship Between Contextual Persistence And Cheating In Preschool Children And Its Educational Implications

Cheating is a serious and widespread problem in our society.While most of the previous research on cheating has focused on college and high school students,some studies have shown that cheating behavior begins to emerge as early as preschool.Since preschool is a critical period for the development of individual moral behavior,it is important to find the key factors that influence cheating behavior before it becomes habitual,so that targeted guidance and intervention can be provided.Among the factors that influence preschoolers’ cheating behavior,persistence is one that has been rarely noticed but cannot be ignored.The persistence in this study refers to “contextual persistence”,which is the level of sustained effort that children put into a challenging task and is usually measured by the duration of persistent effort on the task.Specifically,the present study systematically examined the relationship between contextual persistence and children’s cheating behavior using a behavioral experiment with children aged 3-4 years and 5-6 years.Contextual persistence and cheating behavior were measured by the classic “Difference-Spotting Paradigm”.Children were asked to independently solve a challenging “Difference-Spotting”game(finding subtle differences between each pair of pictures within the given time).In particular,cheating was measured by examining whether children would peek and copy answer in the absence of the experimenter.Children’s level of contextual persistence was measured both before and after the cheating behavior measure,as measured by the time duration during which children persist in the “DifferenceSpotting” task without the opportunity to cheat.The present study consisted of three experiments(N = 250).Experiment 1examined the effect of persistence level on children’s cheating behavior.Children completed an persistence measure task followed by a cheating behavior measure task.It was found that children with higher persistence were less likely to cheat.Experiment 2 examined the effect of cheating behavior on children’s persistence levels.Children were given a persistence measure task both before and after the cheating behavior measure task.It was found that children who cheated had lower post-test persistence levels than children who did not cheat,controlling for the pre-test persistence,and the negative effect of cheating on persistence was mainly found in children aged 5-6 years.Experiment 3 further examined the negative effect of cheating on children’s persistence over time based on Experiment 2.Children were given the persistence measure task before the cheating behavior measure task and one month after the cheating measurement.The results did not find that the negative effects of cheating on children’s persistence continued over time.In summary,the present study first reveals a bi-directional,causal relationship between children’s contextual persistence and their cheating behavior.The above results provide a new research perspective and scientific basis for an in-depth exploration of the factors influencing the development of children’s early integrity behavior,and also provides new ideas for early childhood integrity education and dishonesty intervention.In addition,the results of the study also provide insights to parents,teachers and other educators that they can promote children’s integrity behavior by cultivating and exercising their contextual persistence,so as to reduce or even prevent the occurrence of cheating behavior and contribute to the formation of children’s early integrity behavioral habits and the shaping of integrity qualities.