The relation between young children’s understanding of cheating and their cheating behavior

• In Event: Lying, cheating and fairness: The knowledge-behavior gap in development

Abstract

Cheating is a covert and deliberate way to break a rule in order to gain an advantage (Green, 2004). It is very common in our everyday life from the classrooms to the boardroom. Developmental research on cheating dates back almost 100 years (Hartshorne & May, 1928; Piaget, 1932). To date, the majority of this research has focused on either children’s moral judgement of cheating or on their cheating behavior, but little is known about the relation between these two variables. The present research takes an initial step to bridge this gap in literature by examining whether young children’s understanding of cheating is associated with their actual cheating behavior.

A total number of 50 five-year-olds and 50 three-year-olds played a self-scored guessing game, adapted from the standard version of the temptation resistance paradigm. An experimenter hid a playing card behind a barrier and children were told that they could win a highly desired prize if they could guess correctly the number on the card. The experimenter asked children to first guess the card number by themselves and circle the number they guessed from a set of 11 possible numbers on a small white board (a pretest ensured that children had basic numerical understanding to perform the task), and then check whether their guess was correct by looking at the card placed behind the barrier. The experimenter then instructed children not to break this step-by-step rule before leaving them alone for 60 seconds. Cheating behavior was defined by the child peeking at the card number before circling the number that he/she guessed on the board, and was coded based on video recordings taken by a hidden camera. One week after the guessing game, children performed a set of tasks that assessed their moral understanding and judgements of cheating on a similar task.

We found that 94% of children (88% of 3-year-olds and 100% of 5-year-olds) judged cheating to be morally wrong. However, 40% of them (48% of 3-year-olds and 32% of 5-year-olds) cheated in the guessing game (see Figure 1). Logistic regression analyses also revealed that none of the moral understanding assessments were significantly related to children’s actual cheating behavior in either age group. These findings extend previous developmental work by showing a dissociation between young children’s moral understanding of cheating and their actual cheating behavior. They also speak to the psychological insights of knowledge-behavior gap by suggesting that such gap also exists in the moral domain of cheating.

Authors

• Wenjin Sun, Hangzhou Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Li Zhao, Hangzhou Normal University, P. R. China
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gail D Heyman, University of California - San Diego
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kang Lee, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author