Children’s Performance and Social Behaviour During Competitive Games

Children experience competition daily, with these situations requiring children to balance goal attainment with social relationships. Increasingly, within children's spaces (e.g. schools, sports clubs), there are discussions regarding the benefit or risk of children’s participation in competition. Yet, there is limited work examining the contextual and individual factors that relate to children’s behavior when engaging in competition. Addressing this gap, the present study explored how competitive game outcome and children’s individual characteristics, including socio-cognitive skills (emotion regulation, theory of mind, executive functioning) and socio-demographics (age, gender) related to their task performance and social behavior toward opponents. Canadian children (ages 4 to 9, N = 143) competed against virtual peers in a series of online games wherein they had to “collect” objects, with the game outcome rigged. To measure social behavior, children sent messages and indicated the number of stickers that should be given to the opponent. While the overall performance did not differ by individual factors, girls and children with better emotion regulation showed a greater difference in performance between winning and losing (with a difference in scores expected due to the game programming). The coded prosociality of messages was not related to individual or contextual factors, but sticker distributions were predicted by ToM (higher ToM related to fewer stickers) and gender (when winning, girls gave more stickers than boys). Findings highlight the importance of considering individual factors, such as gender, emotion regulation, and ToM, when understanding children’s responses to winning and losing during competition.