The Influence Of Guilt On White Lies Behavior Of 4-to 5-years Old Children

White lies is a kind of pro-social lie told out of consideration for the interests of others and to avoid hurting others.This kind of lie often has positive social significance,and its motivation is often white,which plays an important role in the maintenance of interpersonal relations.Previous studies on children’s white lie behavior mostly investigated the influence of age characteristics,cognition and environmental factors on white lies behavior,and paid less attention to the influence of emotion on children’s white lies behavior.Guilt is a typical self-conscious emotion,and existing adult studies suggest that guilt can promote individual repair or prosocial behavior.Developmental studies have shown that children at the age of 3can already experience guilt.Based on this,this study intends to investigate the effect of guilt on white lie behavior of 4-and 5-year-old children.This study includes three experiments,a total of 280 children aged 4-5years old took part in the test.(1)experiment 1 used fault situational paradigm to initiate children’s guilt to investigate the effect of guilt on the development rate of white lies behavior of 4-and 5-year-old children.The subjects were designed with 2(emotion: guilt,no emotional baseline)× 2(white lie type: altruistic white lies;Pareto white lies),with white lies behavior as the dependent variable.The results of binary logic regression showed that the main effect of emotional condition was significant,the incidence of white lies behavior of4-5-year-old children under guilt condition was significantly higher than that without emotional priming condition,and the main effect of white lies type was not significant.there was no significant difference in the incidence of lying behavior between the two kinds of white lies.(2)in experiment 2,fault situation paradigm was used to initiate children’s guilt to investigate the short-term and long-term effects of guilt on white lies in 4-and 5-year-old children.The pre-and post-test design of2(test time: T1,T2)× 2(white lie type: altruistic white lies;Pareto white lies)was adopted,and the white lies behavior was taken as the dependent variable.The results of binary logic regression showed that the main effect of time interval was not significant,there was no significant difference in the incidence of white lies behavior between 4-5 years old children at T1 time point and T2 time point,and the main effect of white lies type was not significant.there was no significant difference in the incidence of lying behavior between the two kinds of white lies.(3)in experiment 3,the fault situation paradigm was used to initiate children’s guilt emotion to investigate the object specificity of the effect of guilt on white lies in 4-and 5-year-old children.The intersubject design of2(communication object: injured party,bystander)× 2(lie type: white lies type: altruistic white lies;Pareto white lies)was adopted,and the white lies behavior was taken as the dependent variable.The results of binary logic regression showed that the main effect of lying objects was significant,the incidence of white lies behavior of 4-5-year-old children under the condition of victims was significantly higher than that of bystanders,the main effect of white lies types was not significant,and the rate of white lies was significantly higher than that of altruistic lies.The interaction between gender and lying object is significant,that is,there is no significant difference in the incidence of white lies behavior between boys under bystander condition and victim condition,while the incidence of white lie behavior of female students under bystander condition is significantly lower than that under victim condition.In summary,compared with the non-emotional baseline condition,after the induction of guilt,the white lies behavior of 4-5-year-old children increased significantly,and its effect had short-term,long-term effects and object-specific characteristics of lying.This result suggests that the guilt induced by negligent behavior can promote children’s immediate and long-term prosocial behavior towards the directly injured party,and its main purpose is to undertake or make up for their own negligent behavior.however,there is no obvious tendency of prosocial behavior for onlookers.