Cheating In Preschool Children Aged 5-6: The Role Of Theory Of Mind

Children's ability to follow the rules unsupervised is one of the main goals of socialization and an important milestone in early development.The process of children's social development is the process of learning social norms and internalizing regulations.In the pre-school stage,children's daily activities also need to be carried out around established rules and the code of conduct is often guided by rules.In this process,children treat the observance of social norms as a positive emotional experience.In contrast,children who have less internalized social norms tend to ignore or even break the rules and directly show cheating behavior.Studies have shown that children are more likely to cheat when they are alone.Given this,the purpose of this study is to systematically investigate the mechanism and influencing factors of cheating behavior in pre-school children under the temptation resistance paradigm to lay a solid foundation for exploring the development of cheating behavior in pre-school children.In this study,preschool children aged five to six were taken as subjects to investigate the cheating behavior of children by using the improved temptation resistance paradigm.Cheating in young children is the act of an individual clearly knowing the rules of the game but deliberately breaking them for the sake of extrinsic reward.The operative definition of this study was that in the last match,children showed apparent violations(i.e.,flipping through playing cards and restoring them to their original state)within a minute of the experimenter leaving the room.Specifically includes three studies:Study 1 explored the cheating behavior of 5-6-year-old children under different reward types and commitment situations.The results showed that:(1)there were 67 people cheating in this study,the cheating rate was 42.41%,and there was no significant difference between the two age groups;(2)there was no difference between the cheating behavior of children under material reward and spiritual reward;(3)there was a difference between the cheating behavior of children under commitment group and non-commitment group,and commitment could significantly reduce the cheating behavior of children;(4)the stratified chi-square results showed that the children in the six-year-old group paid attention to spiritual reward regardless of whether they committed or not.In the second study,the effects of theory of mind and inhibition control on preschool children's cheating behavior were further investigated.The results showed that there was an age difference between the theory of mind and inhibition control in preschool children aged five to six.With the increase of age,the theory of mind and inhibition control in children increased significantly.The third study was carried out based on the first study and the second study to explore the internal and external influencing factors of cheating in preschool children aged five to six.Logistic regression analysis was performed on external factors(reward type and commitment)and internal factors(theory of mind and inhibition control).The results showed that commitment and second-order false belief significantly predicted children's cheating behavior.By taking age as an independent variable and cheating behavior as dependent variable,we use the Bootstrap method to test the mediation effect.The mediation model shows that the second-order false belief completely mediates the effect of age on cheating.With age,the cheating behavior of children with the second-order false belief decreases significantly.The whole study showed that the cheating behavior of preschool children aged five to six was influenced by internal and external factors.From external factors,there was no difference in the cheating behavior of children in different reward types.Inhibition control and first-order false belief are not related to cheating behavior of pre-school children.Second-order false belief is negatively associated with cheating behavior of children.Taken the internal and external factors of cheating behavior into consideration,it is found that the second-order false belief completely mediates the effect of age on cheating behavior.According to the above results,it can provide a piece of strong evidence for raising the consciousness of rules in pre-school children aged 5-6 years.