Freedom to Learn

The roles of play and curiosity as foundations for learning

Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College, is a specialist in developmental and evolutionary psychology and author of an introductory textbook, Psychology. See full bio

December 4, 2008, Child Development

The Value of Play II: How Play Promotes Reasoning in Children and Adults

Play improves problem solving by heightening our imagination.

Here is another example of an experiment showing the power of a playful mood to improve problem solving. In this case the subjects were college students and the problem was a classic insight problem, called candle problem. In this task, subjects are given a small candle, a book of matches, and a box of tacks and are asked to attach the candle to a bulletin board in such a way that the candle can be lit and will burn properly. They are allowed to use no objects other than those they were given. The trick to solving the problem is to realize that the tacks can be dumped out of the box that holds them and the box can then be tacked to the bulletin board and used as a shelf on which to mount the candle. In the typical test situation, very few people solve this problem. They fail to see that the tack box can be used for something other than a container for tacks.

In the experiment, some subjects were exposed to a slapstick comedy film for a short period just before being presented with the candle problem, while others saw a serious film and still others saw no film. The result was that watching a slapstick film greatly increased the percentage of subjects who solved the problem.[3] The researchers' interpretation was that a happy mood broadens thought and leads to insight. My own interpretation is similar but emphasizes the role of play. I think the slapstick comedy put the subjects in a playful state of mind and that playfulness, not just happiness itself, led to the broadened way of thinking. In play, we regularly view objects and information in new ways. In a serious state of mind, whether we are happy or not, we fail to imagine that a tack box might be a shelf; but in a playful state such imagination comes easily. In play we regularly imagine objects to be other than what they were originally designed for. In play a broom can be a horse, a thimble can be a bishop, and a tack box can easily be a shelf.

One of the main purposes of play in our species, I think, is to promote our use of imagination to solve problems. We appear to be the only animal that thinks in imaginative ways. Imagination provides the foundation for our inventiveness, our creativity, and our ability to plan for the future. I believe that our huge capacity and desire for play came about, in evolution, partly to promote our capacities to invent, create, and plan. When we allow children ample opportunities for real play, we are providing them with opportunities to exercise and develop those capacities. When we allow ourselves to take a playful attitude in our work and domestic life, we are providing ourselves with a context for solving problems that might otherwise be intractable.
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References
1. Dias, M. G., & Harris, P. L. (1988). The effect of make-believe play on deductive reasoning. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 6, 207-221.
2. I elaborate on the idea that "abstract" thought is really just concrete thought coupled with imagination in my textbook, Psychology, 5th edition (2007), pp 348-351.
3. Isen, A. M., Daubman, K. A., & Nosicki, G. P. (1987). Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 1122-1131.