Abstract
The multifaceted relationship between play and innovation has long fascinated scholars across disciplines. Yet, we lack robust empirical evidence regarding the causal pathways that may connect these two behavioural concepts. While much work has revolved around how play might drive innovation in childhood, there has been little focus on how play might contribute to transformative societal innovation. Studies investigating play and innovation have taken a short-term synchronic perspective to innovation and have focused mainly on invention (i.e. the first instance of a novel behaviour), interested in how play might increase behavioural flexibility and problem-solving skills. Although these approaches cannot speak to population-level innovation (i.e. novel information that spreads across groups), evidence from such studies is often marshalled to support claims about the role of play for societal innovation dynamics over time. Here we propose that the link between play and population innovation has not been robustly demonstrated because of 1. a lack of precise specification of the causal pathways linking the two and 2. a mismatch between the scale on which play is measured and the scale on which population-level innovation operates. We narrow in on a specific kind of play (object play), a specific life history period (childhood), and a specific kind of innovation (population-level), and introduce a causal framework highlighting long-term processes to understand the state-of-the-art knowledge landscape and to guide future work. We synthesise three mechanistic pathways linking the children’s play and population-level innovation: exploration, development, and cultural evolution. We design formal causal diagrams that link children’s play and population-level innovation via the three mechanisms we identified, and consider potential confounds relevant to each. Our explicit long-term populational perspective on the link between play and innovation sheds light on productive means to move the field forward.