Primary School Children's Development Of Lying Cognition And Lies-Telling Behavior Based On Different Motivations

Lies-telling is a human behavior, which means someone purposefully conceals or falsifies the facts or emotional information through verbal or non verbal way, in order to induce others to form a belief which the communicator himself thinks is false. It includes three components: cognition, emotional experience and behavior. In early childhood education, it is one of the most important moral issues. In order to provide theoretical guidance to moral education, this research probed into Grade 1, 3, 5 students' moral judgment and emotional experience to lies by reason of different motivations and lying behavior by individual interviews and experiments.Study 1, by the projection of situational story, examined 96 students aged 7, 9, and 11, to explore the cognition, moral judgment, emotional experience and attributions to different motivations lies. The results show that: (1) while doing moral judgment to lies, subjects mostly judged by the Reality factor, which supports the Prototypical Approaches; while doing moral evaluation, subjects considers the motivation and situation factors, which supports the Folkloristic Model. With age, children's assessment scores of the White Lie are significantly increased between 9-11 years old; (2) when making the moral evaluation, the attribution which subjects' according to could be classified as four categories: Honest-Orientation, Current-Orientation, Escape Punishment-Orientation, and Others-Orientation. Different ages make different attributions; (3) the emotional experience could also be classified as four categories: positive emotions, negative emotions, neutral emotions and contradictory feelings. With age, more subjects experience positive emotions in the White Lie.Study 2, examined 270 students aged 7, 9, and 11 by experiment, to explore how the different motivations influence their lie-telling behavior, and examine the relationship between children's conceptual knowledge of lying and lie-telling behavior. The results show that: (1) in the material award condition, 7-year-old subjects tend to tell lies. But different ages have not significant difference; (2) 7-year-old and 9-year-old children's lie-telling behavior is influenced by different motivations. The material award causes most lies, the spiritual award causes less, and no award caused least; (3) there is no relationship between children's conceptual knowledge of lying and lie-telling behavior. Most children, who make negative moral judgment and experience negative emotions to the lies, will also tell lies in order to get the material or spiritual award.Based on the above results, in order to improve children's moral education, this study offered several points, such as, imparting knowledge about White Lie to the low-grade children, and used award especially material award with caution.