Face Culture and Prosocial Value Conflict: A Developmental Investigation of Children’s White Lie Decisions Between Emotional Comfort and Long-Term Goals

White lie-telling reflects children's integration of moral cognition and situational adaptation, yet its mechanisms in prosocial dilemmas remain understudied in Chinese cultural contexts that prioritize "face-saving"-a core construct that shapes interpersonal behavior in Eastern societies. This study investigates how situational cues and developmental differences shape children's white lie decisions by disentangling the interactive effects of external expectations and recipient presence. A total of 629 children aged 4-11 years (Study 1) and 6-11 years (Study 2) participated in two studies using a modified "painting evaluation task" Study 1 manipulated emotional expectation and recipient presence to establish baseline situational effects, while Study 2 introduced target expectation to create a prosocial value conflict between providing immediate emotional comfort and supporting long-term developmental goals. The Study 1 showed the highest white lie rate under the "emotional expectation + recipient presence" condition, with white lie rates exhibiting a significant developmental increase with age. Binary logistic regression identified these two factors as critical predictors of children's white lie behavior. In Study 2, amid such prosocial value conflicts, older children showed lower white lie rates than younger peers, who prioritized others' long-term goals via cost benefit analysis. Notably, recipient presence still moderated face-saving decisions, even for older children. This research makes three key contributions to the field. Firstly, it integrates Chinese "face culture" into situational manipulation, highlighting recipient presence as a culture-specific moderator and mitigating the Western-centric bias in prior research. Secondly, it constructs a prosocial moral dilemma to uncover children's developmental transition from emotion-driven to value-based rational decision-making, extending existing developmental theories on moral cognition. Thirdly, it advances understanding of prosocial lying motivation beyond blind empathy by quantifying the interactive effects of dual expectations and revealing that children engage in deliberate cost benefit analysis that aligns with others' overall long-term interests.