Children's Behavior Of Promise And Their Promise Value: A Developmental Study

A "number-guessing using playing card" task in adapted "temptation resistance" paradigm was used in the present study. Three hundreds 5- to 9-year-old children took part in the task, whom including intermediate class and pre-school class children in kindergarten and one to three grade children in elementary school. And they were also told 8 stories of evaluation of promise. The study examined whether or not children can fulfill their promise and its relationship with children's moral evaluation of promise. Two experiments in total were conducted:Experiment 1 mainly discussed children's behaviors of transgression after they assured to adult, that is, whether or not they can honour their promise, and the influences of promise on children's lying behaviors. What's more, the variation trends of them as age increased were explored too. In experiment 2, eight stories with three factors which including promise, transgression and behavior's seriousness were assessed through clinical interviews, aim to explore children's moral judgement of promise behavior and the attribution of them, and also the relationship between children's deeds of fulfilling promise and their moral evaluation of promise.The results of the experiments were as follows:(1) Most of the children of 5- to 9-year-old peeked at the playing card while they were lured by "number-guessing" game.(2) Children of 6 to 8 years old can fulfill their promises to adult effectively, in other words, promise not to peek can reduce their transgression behaviors significantly. However, children at the age of 5 and 9 can't honour their promises.(3) Whether or not children have assured their demeanour of no-peeking, there's nearly no effects on children's choice of being honest or dishonest. (4) Although promises have no influences on some children, however,9 years old children's promise can significantly improve their lying strategy. Whereas, children who below 9 years old, their lying ability haven't changed.(5) To all the children between 5- and 9-year-old, a transgression action will be obtained even more negative scores because of promise. Similarly, an abidance action will be evaluated even more active.(6) While assessed the transgression behaviors, children under 7 years mainly based on the severity of events, children above 7 years can consider both the severity and the promises. As regards the abidance action, all of the children used the promises as the most important criterion.(7) Only a minority of 5 years children had had the promise value. As age increased, more and more children had promise consciousness, and nearly all of the children possessed promise consciousness until they were 8 years.(8) To all the children, there's no relationship between the moral evaluation of promise and their factual behavior. That is to say, no matter what promise was appraised, active or negative, it had no effects on children's promise behavior.(9) There's a link between children's promise value and their actual behavior. In more specific terms, children's promise value of slight violation rather than serious violation was relevant to the actual behavior.