Came up in a thread about dinosaur and related monster movies.
Play seems to have been a convergent evolutionary feature in several lines. But many other lines not.
What drives its development?
As you may know, I’m a fan of trying to resolve subtle or complex questions with ChatGPT, even though many are dismissive of it. I was curious so I consulted GPT. Here’s what I got. Any opinions on this?
Hid overly large AI dump.
What drives play behaviour in humans, especially children? What evolutionary purpose does it serve?
ChatGPT said:
Play behavior in humans, especially in children, is driven by a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors, and serves a deep evolutionary purpose.
What Drives Play Behavior?
Neurological and Biological Factors
The limbic system, including the amygdala and dopaminergic pathways, is active during play, especially in exploratory and social play.
Endorphins and dopamine are released during playful activity, reinforcing the behavior.
Children are biologically primed to engage in play during critical developmental windows—it’s spontaneous and intrinsically motivated.
Cognitive and Emotional Curiosity
Play is a natural outlet for curiosity, which is essential for learning.
It provides low-risk environments for experimenting with ideas, emotions, cause and effect, and problem-solving.
Social Drives
Children are naturally inclined to play with others to develop social bonds, learn cooperation, and understand social rules and hierarchies.
It helps develop empathy, theory of mind, and communication skills.
Evolutionary Functions of Play
Skill Development (Motor, Cognitive, Social)
Rough-and-tumble play mimics combat and hunting behaviors in a safe setting, aiding motor development and impulse control.
Pretend play enhances abstract thinking, role-taking, and language.
Problem-solving and tool use can be rehearsed in play before needing those skills in real life.
Learning Social Roles and Cultural Norms
Through play, children explore and internalize the norms, values, and practices of their culture. It functions as cultural transmission.
Role-play helps children simulate adult responsibilities—parenting, trading, negotiating—before they face them for real.
Brain Plasticity and Flexibility
Species with longer juvenile periods (like humans) exhibit more complex play behaviors. The extended childhood in humans is thought to allow for brain development and cognitive flexibility, facilitated by play.
Stress Regulation and Emotional Resilience
Play helps children regulate emotions and develop resilience. It’s used as a way to cope with fear, conflict, or trauma.
“Rehearsing the unexpected” (like in mock fear games) prepares them for real-life stressors.
Sexual and Competitive Selection
Play can signal fitness to peers and future mates—especially in adolescence and beyond.
It often involves competition, negotiation, and showcasing creativity or intelligence.
Why Children Especially?
Children are in a critical phase of learning, and evolution has shaped their brains to seek out and benefit from play.
The cost of mistakes in childhood is low, so play provides a safe simulation of adult challenges—“training without stakes.”
Cross-Species Insight
Many mammals engage in play (especially social species), and its presence is linked with larger neocortex size, social complexity, and long juvenile phases.
Human play is especially rich because of our language, symbolic thinking, and culture.
In Summary:
Play in children is not just “fun”—it’s a deeply evolved behavior that serves to build skills, brains, and relationships necessary for survival and thriving in complex human societies. It’s nature’s way of ensuring learning happens effectively and joyfully.
You said:
Can you provide some authoritative cites for your responses?ChatGPT said:
Certainly. Here are authoritative sources—from developmental psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology—that support the major points made about the drives and evolutionary functions of play:
Jaak Panksepp (2007). “Play and the Regulation of Emotion”.
Panksepp, a pioneer in affective neuroscience, identified play as a basic emotional system in mammals, driven by subcortical brain circuits and crucial for social bonding and emotional regulation.
Panksepp, J. (2007). Play and the Regulation of Emotion. In A. D. Pelligrini (Ed.), The Role of Play in Human Development
Peter Gray (2009). “Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence”
Gray argues that play evolved in humans to promote cooperation, problem-solving, and emotional resilience in complex social groups.
Gray, P. (2009). American Journal of Play, 1(4), 476–522.
Karl Groos (1898). “The Play of Animals” and later “The Play of Man”
Groos was among the first to suggest that play is practice for life, anticipating later evolutionary psychology. His ideas continue to influence modern thinking on play as instinctive learning.
Bjorklund & Pellegrini (2000). “Child Development and Evolutionary Psychology”
This paper explains how cognitive and motor play behaviors evolve to help children develop complex skills.
Bjorklund, D. F., & Pellegrini, A. D. (2000). Child Development, 71(6), 1687–1708.
Brian Sutton-Smith (1997). “The Ambiguity of Play”
Sutton-Smith categorized different types of play and highlighted its role in adaptation and identity-building, while criticizing narrow interpretations.
Lev Vygotsky (1933, translated later): “Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child”
Vygotsky emphasized how social pretend play promotes cognitive and emotional development and internalization of cultural norms.
Barbara Rogoff (2003). “The Cultural Nature of Human Development”
Demonstrates how play behavior varies across cultures but serves consistent functions in social learning and development.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (2009). “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding”
Argues that prolonged childhood in humans co-evolved with cooperative caregiving and rich play behavior to enhance social cognition.
Melvin Konner (2010). “The Evolution of Childhood”
Comprehensive anthropological work detailing how human childhood (and associated play behavior) evolved to support brain growth and learning.
6. Cross-Species Perspective
Marc Bekoff & John Byers (1998). “Animal Play: Evolutionary, Comparative, and Ecological Perspectives”
Explores play across species, linking it to social brain development and adaptive learning.
Gordon Burghardt (2005). “The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits”
Defines five criteria for identifying play in animals and examines its evolutionary roots.
Essentially it seems to be training; animals tend to play at things they are specialized in. Cats love sneaking, stalking and pouncing, dogs like chasing and biting and so on.
Play isn’t just a “convergent evolutionary feature”; it is a behavior that can be observed in mammals, aves, cephalopods, and many other clades of animals including (possibly) some crustaceans and insects. Jaak Panksepp, one of the founders (and originator of the term) of the field of affective neuroscience, identified PLAY as one of the primary emotional impulses along with SEEKING, CARE, LUST, FEAR, PANIC, and RAGE. (Panksepp consistently capitalized the terms to emphasize the primacy of them.)
Regardless of the utility that it serves, which may vary from species to species, it appears to be a fundamental element of pre-cognitive awareness, behavioral conditioning, communication, and ability to form social attachments.
Stranger
It’s natural result of intelligence enabling abstraction. Playing animals act as though they’re doing something else: fighting, seeking food, finding mates, etc. But they do it in a safe, make-believe way. Playing make-believe requires, at some level, layering a kind of fake reality on top of actual reality. You fight, but you don’t fight too hard so you don’t injure your playmate. You pretend that those rocks are a useful resource, not just rocks. Etc.
It’s the same reason why humans can read a book or watch a movie and engage with it as if it were real. We pretend that the words describe a real thing. The kitten pretends that the littermate is a vicious predator or that the stuffed ball is actual prey. They both require a kind of abstraction where the object is representative of something else.
After generations of not-really-chickens, an egg hatched the first truly chicken
By this reasoning, adulthood was invented by children more than childhood was invented by adults. And the method of that was via fantasization and playacting.
Childishness will never be entirely outgrown, and with God’s grace it never will be. But immature cruelty and selfishness should be outgrown, instead of encouraged as adult accomplishments. Playacting doesn’t have to be a game one plays on the world so as to emerge the victor. It can be an ideation of goodwill towards oneself and among others. Walter Mitty’s of the world unite!
Play allows young animals to practice skills that will be needed in adulthood - hunting, fighting, socialising. For social animals, it’s also one way to build relationships with siblings or other members of a group. The extent to which a species engages in these behaviours, and how instinctive vs learned they are, presumably influences how much they play.
For human children, play is highly influenced by the media. When I was a kid, just after WW2, we played soldiers or cowboys. This was because most of the films we saw were either war or cowboy-related.
I don’t know what games children played in the 70s, but in the 80’s, television had taken over, and our children moved through a progression of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Buzz Lightyear.
Not really satisfied by any answer yet. And I don’t have a good one myself.
The ChatGPT is generic about play, not at all about the question asked. Awful.
Sure, play can serve the utility of practicing skills, of training, of preparing to be adults.
But while it is, as @Stranger_On_A_Train points out, seen in many lines, “mammals, aves, cephalopods, and many other clades of animals including (possibly) some crustaceans and insects”, it is also not seen in many species of the lines. And it does not tightly correlate to the members of those lines that are at some threshold of precognitive awareness, abstract thought capacity, and/or social attachment.
Why the similar set of behaviors in crocodiles, cichlids, and even it seems wasps, but not many other, otherwise similar, reptiles, fish, or social insects?
Maybe it is just superficially similar behavior in some of them? Maybe it serves the practice role in some species, the cognitive development skills building in others, and it is something else in less cognitively advanced species?
I also said “building relationships”. Here’s a substack essay about how play facilitates cooperation in animals:
The whole substack seems to be about play, so there’s probably a lot of other relevant entries.
Are we really sure those other species don’t play? Until recently we would have assumed only mammals and birds play, and behaviours that looked like play in fish etc were being misinterpreted. It’s harder to prove a negative; what if we simply haven’t seen or understood play behaviour in those species yet?
I think play is found among the young (and sometimes the adults) of intelligent species that need to learn skills, and don’t just behave entirely by instinct. As others have said, it’s a relatively safe way to learn critical skills, which include hunting, socializing, fighting, etc.
We know they have not been observed to engage in behaviors that look like play.
I am beginning to wonder more the other direction. Are all behaviors that are being called play the same thing? Or are we doing some anthropomorphizing and interpreting a variety of actions as play when they are actually not. Which of course then gets down to what defines “play”?
Moderating:
In the future, don’t make such a large dump of text from ChatGPT or similar engines. This is not what the SDMB is about and it is actually obnoxious to do so as the first reply.
This is the rule in the TOS concerning this situation:
Artificial intelligence (AI). AI-generated responses must be clearly marked as such. Do not use AI to generate entire posts. AI responses are often unreliable – if you use them as the primary source for your assertions, you’re likely to get a lot of flak on this board.
I don’t think all play behaviours are the same thing. It’s a label about how they seem to us, no more.
Play comes into play (heh) when evolution can afford it. All vertebrates are born with a basic “play” circuit in the midbrain—a built-in drive to goof around. Even hand-raised baby crocodiles will bat sticks around like reptilian toddlers. But for animals with big, flexible brains—like mammals, birds, and even some clever fish—those rough templates aren’t enough. They need postnatal practice. That’s where play comes in, especially when there’s plenty of food, a safe space, and social buddies to roughhouse with.
For species that skip playtime, it’s because the math just doesn’t add up. For example, snakes grow fast on lean energy budgets, and solitary bees or salmon hatch out of the egg knowing their one main job. In their worlds, playing around for fun is a luxury they can’t afford. The risks—getting eaten, wasting calories—outweigh any slight gains from experimenting. So, evolution shelves the whole play idea in those species.
Bottom line: play isn’t about being smart or cute—it’s a biological investment strategy. If roughhousing or goofing off helps a creature survive and thrive, nature keeps it on the books. If not? Sorry, kid. No soup recess for you!
Not that I think you don’t understand this but it bears stating explicitly that also we often tend to view the reason for behaviors or faculties in terms of the utility they provide, the evolutionary impetus and history may come from a very different origin. The ancestors of birds did not develop wings in order to fly; they developed them for balance and forward propulsion when running up steep slopes and descending from perches (as domestic chickens use them today) but as they became larger and more flexible, and the metabolism and body plan of aves became more energetic and lighter, wings could provide the ability for controlled flight, the ability to nest in high branches out of the reach of predators, and to hunt prey from above.
Similarly, although the PLAY drive certainly serves to allow creatures to cultivate useful skills and social behaviors, it (likely) exists as a primitive system for exploration of the environment and experimentation with their senses and appendages. Even simple creatures like flatworms with very simple brains display PLAY-like experimental behaviors from which they form memories and behavioral patterns even though they don’t have any kind of specialized skills or engage in social interactions. And creatures that are very distant from an evolutionary sense from mammals or aves, such as octopus and cuttlefish, display very obvious PLAY instincts, often with no practical utility beyond pure curiosity.
Stranger
Having now had the surplus energy and time to play with this idea … this is basically Spencer’s “surplus energy hypothesis.” Maybe with some mash up of Groos’s “instinct practice hypothesis”. And it makes sense that species that have childhoods with energy abundance can use that energy to practice adult skills. Not sure how the hypothesis tests out comparing cichlids to other fish, or crocodiles to other reptiles?
@MrDibble’s confirmation that much of what is labeled as play may be very dissimilar to what we think of as play as mammals, especially sentient ones, is appreciated. Some of what gets called play may just be odd sterotypies. We impose an interpretation that the crocodile or bird looks like they are self motivated and having fun, playing, but not the same thing. I may be barking up the wrong tree think of it as a convergence when it is instead a faulty interpretation.
Play is not though just a child period behavior. I play now in my later 60s and expect to as long as I live. It is no longer serving the utility of preparing me to be an adult. I haven’t learned it yet, not going to happen now.
But then we older folk still enjoy sex long after our procreation days are past. No need to lose drives just because the evolutionary advantage of them is past its time?
We are wired to get pleasure mastering skills. And practice when it is safe to do so.
Yeah, play is so important to human development that it’s not surprising that the behavior persists into adulthood for many individuals.
Differences in play between species—even close cousins within clades—often come down to evolutionary luck and lifestyle. It’s a roll of the natural selection dice, loaded with factors like energy surplus, brain plasticity, social bonds, and how long the kids stick around.
It’s not just who’s smart enough to play, but who can afford the downtime. Baby crocs get to loiter under mom’s watchful eye, leaving them time to practice their moves before joining the rat race (or, more accurately, the race to eat rats). Meanwhile, a snake or lizard hatches, blinks, and it’s off to the slithering races—no safety net, no recess, no fighting with siblings over toys, no pleading with mom for a McD Happy Meal. Same deal with cichlids vs. other fish: the ones with social lives and parental perks play more. So, even within a clade, it’s not just instinct—it’s circumstance. Play only shows up when nature’s budget allows for playtime.
An interesting on point article:
The last bit seems the most consistent with how this thread has gone.