Competence Development In Preschool Children Suspicion

Suspecting is an uncertain state of mind from doubting, guessing, or intrusting in others. It reflects the understanding of beliefs and mental representation of the individuals. It is the basis of selective trust. And it is also an important composition of its social cognition. Children (N=104) aged3,4, and5years aimed to investigating both the occurrence and development features of preschooler’s distrust by using Individually Measurement Method and Object Finding Tasks. The main results are as follows:Study1examined the performance of young children’s suspecting in the different types of instructions. The results showed that:1) Age trend showed a higher incredulity to the cheater than the helper in different situations at the age of four. And the growth depends close on the realizing of the intentions of others.2)3-year-old did not distinguish between cheaters and helpers in trusting. Reasonable doubt would be formed after they can combine others’intention and knowledge of the location of objects to their suspicious, and it showed obvious developmental trend during4-5-year-old.3) Correlation had found between children’s selective suspect of deceptive over helpful sources and their understanding of mental states after controlling for age.4) Study showed no gender difference in the development of children’s distrust.Study2investigated the difference performances of preschoolers’identification and disbelieve from the good-will liars to the offenders. The results showed that:1) Children discerned of well-intentioned lie generally lower than the violation lies showed significant age trends.84.4%,84.4%,90%of3-,4-and5-year-olds recognized lies in offending narrative. However the ratios reduced significantly to71.8%,56.3%,42.5%when it came to reveal pro-social lies. The4-year-old was a watershed for selective suspicious, and expressed a cross-situational consistency.2) With growth, children’s disbelieve in goodwill liar and evil liar presented trends of polarization. But even their performance was not at ceiling or flooring effect.3) It showed a significantly correlation between intention reasoning, false belief with distrust performance.4) Overall, it still had some difficulties for young children to understand the potential motivation in deception. Research also indicated an unstable self-belief in suspect.In summary, the study revealed age differences in the development of children’s suspect ability in different contexts, as well as the correlation between the development of the Theory of Mind and suspicion, specially the impact of intention reasoning, false belief and self-belief. Results outlined a general framework for pre-school children’s suspected ability, providing a multi-dimensional perspective of social cognitive development for early childhood, and had great implications for safety education of children in daily life.