Abstract: The author’s prior research (Shi & Su, 2006) suggested that children’s deception not only related to their executive function as indicated in the studies of Carlson (1989) and Hala (2001), it may also relate to the magnitude of the situational intimidation children felt when they were deceiving or going to deceive. In study 1 of this paper, different interactive partners were adopted in the overt deceptive situation where children had got to bear some pressures to deceive directly in the face of their partner. When facing various partners, children may feel more or lesser intimidations and hereafter may appear different deceptive behaviors. Specifically, this experiment focused on 6-year-olders’ deceptive/honest behaviors when facing a male adult, a female adult, a same-age boy and a same-age girl as their competitive targets in overt situations. Results indicated children’s gender，target’s gender and their age interactively affected children’s deceptive/honest behaviors. Children tended to cheat the amiable female adult while honest with the stricter male. In some extent, this result proves our hypothesis and additionally suggested to us that there is a significant interactive effect between the genders of the same-age deceivers and deceivees. Boys tended to cheat the same-age boy while girls tended to cheat the same-age girl.
Combining the results of studyt 1 and our prior research, we found that children’s deception is in fact so complicated that it correlates with various factors including situational intimidation and children’s theory of mind. Besides there are some researches (Shapiro, 2005; Ostrov, 2006) indicated that other factors such as children’s relational aggression, temperament, etc. associated with children’s deception too. In order to systematically understand the possible antecedents of children’s deception which could predict children’s future internal and external problematic behaviors, in study 2, we adopted the social development scale for 4-7-year-olders which covering multiple dimensions of children’s social developmental characters to further explore whether other social characters were involved in children’s deception in different situations. Results suggested deception in covert situation correlated significantly with children’s will; Behavioral overt deception correlated with emulative anxiety significantly; Lying correlated significantly with self-conception. These results demonstrated that if the deceptive action is relatively difficult to behave as the covert deception, children’s strength of will may affect their deceiving. While if the deceptive action is easy to carry out as the overt deception, then children’s emulative anxiety takes the advantage and associates with children’s deception. As to lying, children who have a high self-conception tend to lie more likely. All these results reminded us that deception related to various social characters in different deceptive situations. When we study children’s deception and regard if we need to intervene children’s deception, we need to take all these factors mentioned above into our account.

Key words: deception, social intimidation, social character