Children’s Performance and Social Behaviour during Competitive Games with (simulated) Peers

Abstract

Young children are exposed to competitive environments daily, yet relative to cooperative situations, less is known about the factors that influence children’s behaviour during competition. While there is debate in society whether encouraging children to behave competitively is beneficial or detrimental, this work supports the position that competition is an unavoidable context in our social world that children must learn to navigate in order to be successful. My doctoral dissertation examines which contextual and individual factors relate to children’s behaviour within a competitive environment. I seek to understand how children behave socially towards others and perform on the task, as well as how they explain their behaviours during the game as well as the outcome. To achieve my research objectives, an interactive competitive online game was created that allowed observation of different types of children’s behaviours within an experimentally controlled environment. Children (N = 143; ages 4 to 9) competed against virtual opponents wherein they had to click on target objects faster than their opponent, with the game outcome rigged. Following the games, children sent messages to their opponents and indicated the number of stickers that should be given to the opponent, as well as a neutral peer after the competition had ended. Children were also asked to give verbal explanations about why they thought they won or lost against each opponent, as well as explanations for the sticker distributions they gave. Chapter one provides a theoretical background and review of the literature relevant to children’s behaviour during competition, as well as an overview of the aims and hypotheses of this research. Chapter two explores how context (game outcome, opponent gender) and individual characteristics (gender, socio-cognitive skills) relate to children’s task performance and social behaviour towards competitors. Chapter three investigates children’s beliefs and attributions about the game outcome, as well as their reasons for their pre-and-post game resource distributions to others, exploring the insight or motivations behind their behaviours. Chapter 4 integrates the findings from chapters two and three, highlighting their importance and exploring themes within results, and implications arising from this work. The measured dependent variables in this study included task performance (measuring both speed and accuracy for clicking on target objects), prosociality of messages sent to opponents, number of stickers distributed to opponents and the neutral peer, nature of their attributions for winning versus losing, and whether the explanations for their sticker distributions were based on merit. Girls performed significantly better than boys, but only when they were winning. Children with better emotion regulation performed significantly better than children with low emotion regulation when winning. The prosociality of messages was not related to individual or contextual factors, but sticker distributions were predicted by children’s ToM (higher ToM related to fewer stickers) and gender (when winning, girls gave more stickers to their opponents than boys). Engaging in the competitive game did not influence children’s sticker distribution to an unknown peer. Children gave more internal attributions for winning (attributed success to personal factors) and more external attributions for losing (attributing failure to factors about their environment or opponents). Children most often made merit-based explanations for sticker distributions to opponents, and higher merit-based reasoning reflected higher sticker distribution in the losing condition. Findings highlight the importance of considering the interplay of individual and contextual factors when examining children’s behaviour during competition.