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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Developmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1513033
This article is part of the Research Topic Moral Emotions Scrutinized: Developmental, Clinical and Neuroscientific Aspects View all articles

The influence of mutually beneficial and self-beneficial situations on the lying behavior and cognition of Chinese 4-to 5-year-old children

Provisionally accepted
Dan Kang Dan Kang 1Yingjie Zhang Yingjie Zhang 1Xiwu Xu Xiwu Xu 1Jia Jia Li Jia Jia Li 2*
  • 1 Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China
  • 2 Faculty of Education, University of Macau, Taipa, Macao, Macao, SAR China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Children's moral development is influenced by their sociocultural context. However, relatively few studies have investigated whether the sociocultural context affects children's lying behavior and cognition and the relation between them. The present study was designed to examine this question in two experiments by posing two moral dilemmas: lying is good for mutually beneficial (honesty conflicts with mutual interests) and lying is good for self-beneficial (honesty conflicts with self-interests). Experiment 1 used the "hide-and-seek" game to investigate the lying behavior of 96 Chinese 4-to 5-year-old children and found that children lied more in mutually beneficial situations than in self-beneficial situations. Experiment 2 used two videos to investigate lying cognition (conceptualization of lying, moral assessment of lying, and prediction of lying) with the same group of children. Compared with self-beneficial situations, children in mutually beneficial situations were more likely to judge untrue statement as truth, to evaluate lying positively, and to predict that they would lie. Further, in mutually beneficial situations, children's predicted and actual lying behaviors are significantly positively correlated. These findings support the folkloric model and highlight the influence of sociocultural factors on lying in Chinese 4-to 5-year-old children.

    Keywords: Mutually beneficial, self-beneficial, Lying behavior, lying cognition, young children

    Received: 18 Oct 2024; Accepted: 15 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Kang, Zhang, Xu and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jia Jia Li, Faculty of Education, University of Macau, Taipa, Macao, Macao, SAR China

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