The Development Of Children’s Blue Lies:The Influence Of Individual And Collective Factors

In social interactions,social relationships rely on trust,and honesty is an important factor affecting interpersonal trust.On the one hand,honesty promotes the development and maintenance of social relations;On the other hand,lying will have a negative impact on social relationship,because it will damage the trust between individuals,even after the liar has made amends,the act of lying can have lasting negative impact on the liar’s credibility.Therefore,encouraging honesty behavior and reducing lying behavior is essential for individuals’ social interactions.In this study,the game rule of "one person peeks,no prizes for all members" was adopted,and in the anti-temptation game,when the members of the ingroup could not overcome the temptation of the prize and chose to peek,and the individual chose to lie in order to protect the prize of all members,it was a Blue Lies.This study aims to combine children’s internal functional development with external social factors to investigate the influencing factors of children’s Blue Lies.Self-awareness is an individual’s perception and subjective evaluation of his or her physiological,psychological and social functional state,which is an internal evaluation mechanism.Reputation,on the other hand,is an external evaluation of individuals or collectives,and is an external evaluation mechanism.In addition,individuals will join different collectives in the process of socialization,and the internal dynamics in different collectives have different effects on individuals,and the inclusion of the nature of the collective in which children belong to is a problematic collective into exploring the influencing factors of children’s Blue Lies helps us better understand the impact of children’s internal functional development and external social factors on children’s Blue Lies.Therefore,this study aims to study the Blue Lies of young children from both individual and collective factors.Firstly,this study elaborates on the concept,classification,influencing factors,relevant theories,research paradigms and relevant researches of Blue Lies,self-consciousness,peer status,reputation,and proposes the general idea of this study to explore the influence mechanism from individual to collective.There are three experiments:Experiment 1,used the resistance to temptation paradigm,with a total of 541 children aged 3 to 6 years old as participants,to study the influence of individual factors,such as age,self-awareness and personal reputation on children’s Blue Lies.The results showed that:(1)There were significant differences between 3 to 6 years old children in violation behavior and the time to resist temptation.The 4-year-old group had significantly more violation behavior than the other three age groups,while the 6-year-old group had significantly longer time to resist temptation than the other three age groups.(2)Self-awareness had a significant effect on 3-and 4-year-old children’s Blue Lies after the violation;There was no significant effect on 5-and 6-year-old children’s Blue Lies.(3)After the violation,individual reputation had no significant effect on 3 to 6 years old children’s Blue Lies.Experiment 2 also adopted the paradigm of resisting temptation to try to explore the influence of internal factors on children’s Blue Lies.A total of 356 children aged 4 to 6 years old were taken as subjects to explore the influence of collective factors such as age,peer status and peer reputation on children’s Blue Lies.The results showed that:(1)Before the violation,peer status had a significant effect on the violation behavior of 4 to 6 years old children.Compared with the 4-year-old group,the children with high peer status in the 5-and 6-year-old group had less violation behavior,but there was no significant difference in the time of resisting temptation among the three age groups.(2)Peer status had no significant effect on the Blue Lies of 4 to 6 years old children after the violation.(3)After the violation,peer reputation had no significant effect on the Blue Lies of 4 to 6 years old children.Experiment 3 explores how individuals react when collective and individual interests conflict on the basis of experiment 1 and experiment 2.It also adopts the paradigm of resisting temptation to try to explore the influence of inconsistency between collective reputation and individual reputation on children’s Blue Lies.A total of 361 children aged 4 to 6 years old are taken as subjects.To explore the influence of age,peer status and peer reputation on children’s Blue Lies.The results found that:After the violation,positive collective reputation and positive individual reputation threat,negative collective reputation and negative individual reputation threat,positive collective reputation and negative individual reputation threat had no significant effect on the Blue Lies of 4 to 6 years old children,but compared with 4and 5-year-old children,Positive group reputation and negative individual reputation threat had significant effects on 6-year-old children’s Blue Lies.In conclusion,this study indicates that young children’s Blue Lies is not only affected by age,but also affected by self-consciousness,peer status,collective reputation and individual reputation threat.