🎲 Play Brings People Together
The unifying power of sports and synchrony
Play has a serious side, and it’s not just for kids. Even as adults, we continue to obsess over sports and games. Whether we’re competing or cooperating in play, it generally involves some form of social activity: We coordinate and synchronize with other people and we find great joy in the exercise.
Play starts very early in life. Even the act of act of “pretend play” which requires feats of imagination—e.g. pretending to be another person or using objects as though they’re something different—starts as early as 12 months old. The way in which we play matures as we get older, but the basic concept of play is baked into our biological hardware and expressed throughout life.
⚽️ Soccer with Muslims & Christians
In the middle of a war-torn state, you’d think that play would be the last thing on researchers’ minds. But a 2020 study investigated how a simple game of soccer might bring people together.
In 2014, ISIS captured Mosul and began a genocidal offensive against any Iraqis who didn’t conform to their worldview, forcing Christians and other minority groups to flee their homes. In its wake, it left an enormous tension between Christians and Muslims.
Salma Mousa—a researcher at Stanford University—wanted to test whether social games could noticeably improve relations between these conflicting groups. So she organized a 2-month soccer league and recruited Christian soccer teams from Iraqi cities to participate. On some of those teams, she added three Muslim players to the mix. To mitigate any feelings of threat among Christian teammates, she made sure that those Muslim players were also displaced from their homes by ISIS.
After the league ended, Mousa compared how intergroup relations and attitudes differed between the Christian-only and mixed Christian-Muslim teams. Christians from mixed teams were 26 percentage points more likely to award a sportsmanship prize to Muslim players on opposing teams, and they were almost 50 percentage points more likely to train with Muslim players 6 months later.
At least in the context of sports, cooperative social play improved Christian perceptions of Muslims and reduced harmful prejudices. When Mousa looked at outcomes outside of sports like attending mixed social events or eating at Muslim-owned restaurants, the soccer league didn’t make a difference.
So a 2-month soccer league isn’t a societal panacea. But bringing conflicting people together in team-based play is a good first step in helping them to see the humanity in each other.
🤸 Physical exertion and synchrony
Two active ingredients in soccer and other team sports are physical energy and social synchrony. If these two elements are important in bringing people together, then you’d expect to see a similar effect in other activities that contain those elements too. So let’s look at what happens with group dance.
In a 2015 study, researchers split 264 Brazilian high school students into groups of three. Each group danced together for 10 minutes with a specific level of physical exertion and a specific level of synchrony determined by the researchers.
The researchers then measured two outcomes: 1) Changes in pain tolerance reflecting endorphin release from physical exertion, 2) Feelings of social bonding reflecting the cooperative and synchronous nature of dance.
When dancing was more physically intense and more synchronous, there were larger benefits for pain tolerance. And consistent with the soccer study above, there were also stronger feelings of social bonding and trust between dance partners.
Social games and activities bring people together and even boost their resilience to pain. Many interacting factors are likely to explain these results, but synchrony and physical exertion are an important part of the story.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
Play a team sport: Participate in activities that involve physical exertion and teamwork. They’re not just good for physical health, they’re also good for social health.
Games aren’t just for kids: Whether it’s a board game or online gaming, have fun with joint social activities that require coordination and interaction.
Synchronize with others: Cooperative activities aren’t restricted to the worlds of sports and gaming. Dancing and other social musical activities are a great way to connect and synchronize with other people.
💡 A final quote
“Sports have the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sports can create hope, where there was once only despair.”
~ Nelson Mandela
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👋 Until next time,
Erman Misirlisoy, PhD