Emotions -- Part 5 -- Having Fun
We learn how to use both our desire to win and our empathy for those around us playing games as children. Games and having fun are the basis for all good strategies. Let us start with rats.
Rats learn about the competition of life through rough-and-tumble play. When a larger rat plays with a smaller rat, the larger rat could win every time, but he lets the small rat win about thirty percent of the time. Why? Because if he doesn’t give the small rat a chance, the small rat won’t play with him anymore. Rats, like every other mammal, enjoy having someone to play with. The overly aggressive rat can no longer play because no one wants to play with him.
This fact illustrates an important aspect of winning in the real world. To win the support of others, they have to choose to play with us. Even more importantly, working in life’s competitions, we must understand that we are just having fun, trying to play. People will ignore us if they do not enjoy playing with us. It is no fun being ignored. Life and its competitions are many things, but one of the goals we all have is the desire to enjoy ourselves. Winning is fun, but playing with others is more fun than playing with ourselves (hah!). Before we can establish a competitive position in any competitive realm, we must first be accepted into the game
Inborn and Learned
Our aggression, that is, our desire to make progress, is inborn, but so is our empathy for others around us. Rousseau taught we were all naturally good, but corrupted by society. Hobbes taught that we are all naturally at war and civilized by society. Since the 1960’s, American society tends to see children are self-regulating, creative, and good. Other cultures see a child as needing the training to become social. So what does modern psychology say about our basic nature? First, we know that aggression peaks in kindergarten and declines over time. Aggressive adults lack empathy, and, because of that, no one wants to play with them. Our aggressive tendencies are balanced both by internal and external forces.
The mental circuitry that governs cooperation out of empathy are as innate to us our aggression. Even rats do not want to see other rats tortured. As infants, we cry when other infants cry. Their distress is our distress. As children, out playing with others teaches us socially-acceptable forms of aggression. We learn to balance our immediate desires against those of others. As we grow, expectations for reciprocity also grow as we learn to think in the longer term. From more abstract forms of games, we learn more about the motivations and emotional reactions of others. Many researchers have discovered that our childhood play increases our emotional and social understanding of others. Eventually, we learn to work towards common goasl.
All animals get pleasure out of play. We use the same dopaminergic reward circuits that underlie exploratory behavior and activate the release of opiates. Children involved in a play fight wrestle, grapple, jump, tumble, and run, while smiling and laughing to communicate their enjoyment. If the game becomes too rough, the laughter turns to tears. This teaches us to limit our aggression.
As we first learn to play, we learn games mostly by imitation. We learn the rules emotionally, even though we cannot write them down. Many of the rules define what is forbidden. Psychologists see these limits as developing our inhibitions. For our personal victory, the ways we play must be unified, so that all players share the same rules and the same goal. This means that any disagreements about the game have to be resolved before we can play, let alone win. The specific brain circuitry mediating the establishment of such agreement has been recently outlined, provisionally, at the prefrontal cortical level.
From Play to Competition
From rough-and-tumble play, we learn to consider the feelings and needs of others. This leads us to more abstract games, those played entirely in our minds and emotions. The most complex forms of play take place in our imagination. They are fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons, but they start with much simpler games, such as playing house, acting out the roles in a family. Understanding these games means understanding the demands of drama and fiction. This requires developing a cooperative morality: the sense of what makes a good story and what makes a bad story.
These fantasies are the basis for all real success in life. A shared strategic mission is a fiction projected onto our future. Establishing positions in various human hierarchies is very like our construction of fantasy worlds. As children, we write a story together when we play pretend. Looking back on my successes in life, I see that my various partners and I were doing the same thing in our different enterprises. Our plans and goals were fictions that we attempted to live in the real world. From living those fictions, we learned how much of our story we could make come true. When real life refused to cooperate, we simply rewrote the plot to include what we were learning, authoring a new story to fit the facts of our lives. This story is shaped by our trials and errors. By this process, we are literally making our dreams, our flights of imagination, come true.
All solid strategy is based on our ability to play well with others. Yes, we must outwit, outplay, and outlast others, but we must also inspire, invite, and reward them so that they continue to play with us. People are both innately good and innately selfish. We want to please others, and we want to please ourselves. We want to make progress, both individually and with our various teams. We want to make so much progress that others are willing and even eager to join us in our games. They don’t join us so that we can win against them, but so they can share in our success.
Conclusions
The basics of play start with our physical games when we are young children, but they become more complex, leading us toward socially-shared games of the imagination. These games become more than games. They become reality. From this constructed reality, we address the basic problems of life, such as satisfying our physical needs. However, the process starts in children by satisfying our emotional need for play.
Why do younger people tend to become tomorrow’s billionaires? Because they have continued the form of play they remember from being children. People like Musk have a Peter Pan-like ability to keep finding new playgrounds and inventing new games to play. Others, like Bezos and Zuckerberg lose their sense of fun and invention, becoming adults and boring.
This article is based on the latest psychological research. To learn the details read the research here on Empathy, Play, and Social Regulation,