Cultivating "Brave Spaces" through Playful Learning Frameworks
A conversation with Thalia Goldstein on her book "Why Theatre Education Matters: Understanding Its Cognitive, Social, & Emotional Benefits" (2024, Teachers College Press).
Thalia R. Goldstein is Associate Professor of Applied Developmental Psychology at George Mason University. Her work focuses on the development of social and emotional skills in children, and how such skills intersect with children’s engagement in pretend play, theatre, drama, and other imaginative activities. She directs the PLAY Lab (Play, Learning, Arts, & Youth Lab) and is also the co-director of the National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab, the Mason Arts Research Center (MasonARC).
She sat down with Anna Abraham and Desiree Sharpe from the Torrance Center at UGA to discuss her latest book: Why Theatre Education Matters: Understanding Its Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Benefits (find out more about the book at this link).
Below is link to the full audio interview. We recommend listening to the interview while reading through it. Video excerpts are embedded within the interview transcript if you prefer a brief listen. Enjoy!
Anna Abraham
Welcome back to the Torrance Center Substack, Reflections in the Pursuit of Creativity! Today we have with us one of our favorite people whose work we like to read – we have had her, I think two years ago for the Torrance Festival of Ideas on Creativity & Learning - it is Professor Thalia Goldstein from George Mason University. We decided to have this conversation with Thalia because she recently released a book - Why Theatre Matters. And every time she releases a book, we are going to ask her to come back here. We wanted to start with where she started on this journey - a lot of the time we don’t get a sense of where people come from in terms of how they got here, so if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, Thalia, you’re now here at George Mason…how did you get there? Where did you start and what took you there? What were the steps you took along the way?
Thalia Goldstein
So, you know, it’s always funny to be like, “when I was a child …”, but actually, when I was a child, I was just a drama kid. I was a theatre kid. It was my favorite thing. I started taking acting classes when I was nine years old and I did theatre all through middle school and high school. I also danced. I did competitive gymnastics. That was really my thing.
My parents, like good immigrant parents, would not let me go to conservatory to study theatre for a living, so I went to college and studied Psychology and also studied theatre, and did a lot of theatre.
When I graduated from college, I graduated having written a thesis in Psychology, not having anything to do with theatre, or creativity, or anything like that. I wrote my thesis firmly in social psychology and rumination because that was the sort of work that I was doing in the lab I was working in at the time. Then I moved to New York City to be a professional actor and I did ‘the thing’, right, where you wait tables and you nanny and you check people in at the gym … I got fired from a temp job at Pfizer because I was a terrible secretary.
I did ‘the thing’ and I went on auditions and I went on tour and I came back again and I was in a dance company … and then I sort of got the academic bug after a few years. The performer’s life is a really hard life. It doesn’t mesh well with my personality. I really want to know what’s coming next. I have lots of deeper questions. The artist personality I think … you have to have much higher tolerance of uncertainty and be willing to not know where your money’s coming from next year. I didn’t like that, so I basically said, “hey, I want to go to graduate school and I want to work with anybody who studies creativity and anybody who studies imagination.”
I applied quite broadly - I applied to several of the senior faculty members that you’ve had on this Torrance Center series of talks, and I applied to social psychology PhDs and developmental psychology PhDs and on and on from there. I ended up being very lucky to work with Ellen Winner at Boston College.
In my first-year graduate seminar in developmental psychology (it was the first developmental psychology class I ever took), I started reading about empathy and started reading about emotional regulation and started reading about theory of mind, which is this understanding of somebody else’s beliefs, desire, and intention.
I went, “wait a minute … this is acting class!” These are all skills I practiced in acting classes and I worked on when I was trying to be an actor and what research is out there that sort of connects these two? That connects these social and emotional skills that are so central to child development with the arts and pretend play and theatre. I went, “great, that’s what I’ll write my first-year paper on … easy peasy, I’ll just review all the literature.”
It took me like four years to feel confident that there wasn’t a literature. I kept asking people, “Have you heard of anything? Is there a secret literature from the 1970s I’m missing somehow?” That’s sort of what launched me and that’s just been my singular sort of focus since then is, “how do we understand the psychology of theatre? How do we understand the psychology of acting and play-acting and pretending? What does that do for social and emotional development, empathy, and emotion regulation?” From there I’ve expanded into creativity studies, into fiction, and understanding of the line between fiction and reality, some stuff on Santa Claus. But it all started from this love of theatre. I’m a drama nerd and I want to figure out the psychology behind it.
Anna Abraham
Yeah, that’s super interesting. I mean, I want to get back to the theatre in a second, but I thought we’d ask you first about this enormous work you’ve done - it’s a report that you did for the OECD, Art for Art’s Sake. So. it’s not just theatre, of course, but art more generally.
I mean, it’s rare for academics to do these sorts of very useful things … I don’t mean to say we don’t do useful things, we do very useful things, we totally do, but it’s an enormous undertaking to do a report for the OECD and make a case for the arts. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that project, how it came to you and Ellen Winner and what you set out to do - what it told you and what were the things that surprised you about that whole enterprise? It is sort of like making a case for the arts to the whole world, really.
Thalia Goldstein
Yeah, so this was a project where – I’ll give the brief history here – the arts have long been justified sort of in a variety of ways: There are some people that say the arts are central and important to being a human being and we should engage in them because they are part of humanity and part of our functioning and part of how we understand the world, right? So that is a sort of pure ‘art for art’s sake’. Aesthetics are important, beauty is important, and art is important for those reasons.
There is a secondary sort of argument, which is the argument for transfer. That is often how arts education is justified in schools and for children, which is that you should take music classes that make you better at music, but also because they make you better at math. You should take visual arts classes because it’ll make you better at reading a biological scan of some sort. You should learn how to do drama because it will make you better at reading, and it will make you better at language. Those are all fine arguments (I don’t necessarily have a problem with those arguments at their base), but there is a deeper problem to them, which is that if you are only giving music classes to children because it’ll make them better at math, well, there’s an easier way to make them better at math, and that’s to give them math classes.
What you’ve really done is sort of circled back around to this idea that the arts are only worthy in that they are in service of something else, and that’s the sort of background through which this project developed. What happened 25 years ago in the year 2000 is Ellen Winner, with several co-authors, did a series of meta-analyses that got published in the Journal of Aesthetic Education that basically said that all of the transfer claims that people had been making about ‘music makes you better at math, drama makes you better at reading, visual arts makes you better at biological perception’, that the evidence behind those claims was extremely weak and basically nonexistent. This caused all sorts of uproar in the year 2000 because people were scared … “Well, if we don’t have a transfer argument for the arts, we have no argument at all!”
From there came these additional projects. If we no longer wanna make the argument that you do music because it makes you better at math, well then what is music actually for? Like, where do we actually have evidence? What one group had done in the visual arts was this project called “The Studio Thinking Projects,” where they had gone in and really broken down the psychological foundations of visual arts. I’ve done that same project, but in theatre, in a book called Why Theatre Education Matters, where I’ve really broken down what theatre does. This project, this Arts for Arts Sake project through the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, who’s the third author, came to Ellen and me and said, “Let’s update that review. Let’s update that transfer review. Let’s talk about where we actually have evidence, where we don’t, where we should care about evidence, where we shouldn’t.”
If you just want to justify the arts because they make you better at math or reading, there’s actually not great evidence on the ground that it does that. There’s not randomized control trials with like strict conditions and stuff like that. What we have instead is burgeoning evidence across lots of different fields for a variety of outcomes that are based in art forms themselves. There is something unique about the holistic nature of an art form. There’s something unique about the intrinsic motivation that kids bring to wanting to engage in the arts, about the way that it allows you to express emotion and make meaning about the world.
That was the approach that we took to the Art for Art’s Sake report, with the idea being that we wanted to give a fair shake to both sides. We wanted to both talk about where the evidence was and what evidence we have from the research literature and talk about the reasons why that’s not the only purpose of the arts. That’s not the only place that the arts should live in our educational system.
Desi Sharpe
I love everything you just said about that because so much of it is about … let’s just stop. We don’t need to make a reason that is tying these arts-based education structures to something other than what it is in and of itself. I would love for you to speak to that, especially based on what you’ve written in Why Theatre Education Matters, which was published last year. I work a lot with K-12 teachers and I would love to hear you speak to what they can use as practitioners from this book. I think there are these critical points that would translate in all domains, honestly, but to kind of highlight, “here’s what theatre education does, but here’s also how you can as a practitioner take these principles in your classroom.”
Thalia Goldstein
Yeah, thank you. It’s a very nice question. So, the way that I think about a habits-of-mind framing – that’s what the Why Theatre Education Matters book does for theatre. It’s also what the studio thinking books do for visual arts. So, if you’re a visual arts teacher, Why Theatre Education Matters, hopefully would be interesting to you, but the studio thinking books do it for visual arts, and Why Theatre Education Matters does it for theatre and for drama.
The idea is that habits-of-mind are, from the broader educational perspective, ways of thinking about the world. They are frameworks. They are a way to bring in multiple psychological skills for particular tasks.
Everybody has a way in which they like to approach problems. Kids have ways to approach problems, adults have ways to approach problems, and you probably approach problems differently than your friends, differently than your colleagues, right? That’s why teams work well together, because lots of people are approaching problems in different ways.
What the habits-of-mind framework does is clarify the ways in which students in these classrooms are taught to solve the tasks or the prompts or the problems of the classroom. A classic example in the theatre classroom is a basic improvisational game, for example, called Machine. Machine is a theatre game; if you’ve taken an introduction to improv or introduction to theatre class, you’ve played this game. Or if you’ve done team building exercises, you might’ve played this game, as well. One person comes to the front of the room and starts making a noise and a movement - a “beep-boop” with an arm going up and down, for example. And then a second person comes to the front of the room and adds onto that. So maybe they do a “whoosh-whoosh.” So it’s going “beep-boop, whoosh-whoosh, beep-boop, whoosh-whoosh,” and on and on until you get five, seven, 10 people all at the front of the room, beeping and booping and whooshing and going all around.
Now you can approach that problem of putting together that improvisational exercise from a variety of different ways. What I did in the book was I studied 40 different acting classrooms from across the United States for about 55 hours of time. We broke down what habits-of-mind, what problem-solving techniques are we seeing, in every classroom at every level. Urban, rural, suburban, ninth grade, 12th grade, conservatory, general education … across all of it, right? What are we seeing?
So, in the case of Machine, for example, you could ask your students to approach Machine from a ‘body awareness and control’ habit-of-mind. “I want you to put this together and I want you to be paying special attention to where your body is in space and time and where your partner’s body is in space and time.” What does it feel like to move over and over again in partnership? How can you make sure you take up the entire space but don’t hit any walls? How can you make sure that your body movement is in concert with somebody else’s body movement? And we know that body awareness and control is related to psychological skills like emotion regulation. It’s related to psychological skills like coping and being aware of your emotional state and how to interact with other people.
So that’s one approach. But you could also approach Machine from a collaboration perspective. You could approach it with the habit-of-mind ‘collaboration’, which is clear communication and joint meaning-making, where as I approach the machine, I think about not necessarily how can I shine the best, but how can I add on to the machine so that the whole machine looks cooler. How can I leave breadcrumbs for the next person who’s going to come up to let them know what pairing I think might look particularly cool in this machine? So, you can approach the machine with the habit-of-mind of collaboration.
You could also approach it with a ‘metacognitive awareness’. A reflect-and-think metacognitively habit-of-mind … “I always want you to be thinking about the purpose of this machine. I always want you to think about how this machine might play into the storybook that we just read or how this machine might then turn into the basis of a scene that we’re about to do.” Always be reflecting about whether or not things are working.
The habits-of-mind are intrinsic to acting classrooms. If I give you no instruction at all, you will, as an actor, as a trained actor, as a student actor, approach these tasks with different perspectives. “I’m really in my body today, so I’m going to be really embodied as I do this.” Or, “I want to make sure that I put Sarah in the best light, so I’m going to do this in collaboration with Sarah.” “I think this machine, like, the teacher said it needs to have a name, so I’m going to be thinking about like, what would be the funniest name for everybody,” right? So, these are things that are integrated and used in acting classes, but a teacher can shape which ones come to the forefront depending on how they introduce the activity.
That was a super long explanation for a relatively simple exercise, but I think it shows the depth of what an acting class can do for students. For acting habits-of-mind, the book explains eight of them; ‘body awareness and control’, ‘reflect and think metacognitively’, and ‘think collaboratively’ are the ones I was just talking about.
Acting classes also involve flexibility and thinking flexibly; classic divergent thinking tasks are put forward into an acting class all the time. Like, “Everybody hold this feather in front of you and now think of 15 different ways to interact with the feather. Now, pretend you are an alien and interacting with the feather …” that might as well be a Torrance Test of Creative Thinking for all its divergent thinking prompt, right? So, that’s inherent in acting classes.
Making firm choices is inherent in acting classes. Imagining and envisioning is inherent in acting classes. Releasing inhibitions and being playful is inherent in acting classes. Depending on what a teacher wants their students to learn in that moment and which set of skills or mindset or approach the teacher wants to get out of their students in that day, they can take the same exercise and put a different framework on it.
I think that is what makes acting incredibly hard to study. If every teacher can do something individualized every day, it’s very hard to use the scientific method on that. But also, it is the reason why acting classes can work in all sorts of different communities, with all sorts of different contexts, with students across age, across background, across education level … that’s why it is such a beautiful, flexible toolkit of exercises. It is so sort of infinitely variable to any teacher who knows their students and knows what they want to get out of a class.
Anna Abraham
I was also thinking about the article related to what you have just said that’s come out recently, which is, “Thinking On Stage” (I think it’s what it’s called), but I do think what gets misunderstood about the arts, that it’s not ‘thoughtless’, but just doesn’t involve reflection in some way. Or that it is very considerate of all of the different elements that have to go into it.
Sometimes when we think about the art as self-expression, we just think it’s about one person kind of going deep within and envisioning something. I think the case with theatre is it’s quite a complex activity that you’re trying to do without it being boring or cognitively complex in the way where you think, “I feel like there’s a huge load on me.” But it’s exciting in that it really requires the development of skillsets, of seeing relations, thinking more widely, everything that you’ve pointed out there, being sort of about understanding all of these perspectives that start from the body and expand to how it comes across to others, like the name of the group or whatever it is. I always get annoyed by people who say, “What’s the point of the arts and what are the transfer effects?” So well done on keeping your head on your shoulders.
But I think part of it is for someone like me, when I say it, the transfer effects are so obvious in that it’s not transfer as in ‘A will lead to B’, but it’s all about making people more aware of their potentiality if you want all of these different things that they have within them.
Theatre offers a very different kind of skillset, I think, and I wondered if you could speak a little bit to the what makes theatre – I don’t want to pit arts against each other, but let’s just do it now – more than dancing. What is it about theatre that allows for … perhaps it doesn’t allow for “more”, maybe you don’t agree that it allows for “more” … but what is it about theatre that might be easier to implement in a classroom setting, or what is it that brings in skillsets that might be more accessible compared to, I don’t know, music making, or trying to sketch something, or dancing, or anything along those lines?
Thalia Goldstein
So, I always joke that my lab’s unofficial motto is, “It’s not a monolith.” Like, it’s not one thing, right?
The arts are not one thing and even theatre is not one thing and social skills are not one thing. As far down as you want to drill, it’s available to you.
So the way that I think about theatre - particularly as compared to other art forms - is that each art form has the psychological skillset that it’s using. It also has representation that it’s using. Music uses sound and rhythm and vibration as a representation of the information that you’re trying to pass along, so the skills to be able to engage in that representation are necessarily different. Thus, what is transferring is going to be different.
Theatre is human psychology represented by humans expressing their psychology. Dance uses the body, sometimes narrative, sometimes not narrative, but it doesn’t really use words. Visual art is sometimes representational and sometimes not representational, but it’s not embodied. Music uses the representation of sound and instruments. Theatre uses words, narrative structure, actual human bodies, and the representation of real life in a false setting. And that makes it different and unique. I would never say better; it makes it different. The skills that you need to use in order to learn how to do theatre are different than the skills that you use in other art forms.
I also think though, that it’s what makes theatre a particularly interesting teaching tool.
Because you can do theatre about anything. You can do theatre about the United Nations. You can do theatre about biological realities. You can do theatre about the solar system. You can do theatre about journalism. Like, the topics that are considered under a theatrical lens are as wide as the topics that humans engage in.
You can do theatre about theatre. We’re always giving Oscars to movies about the movies. Like, La La Land is a movie about movies and 42nd Street is a Broadway show about Broadway shows … we are constantly making theatre about theatre.
But for teachers, if you want to make a biology lesson feel less pressured, you can put it into a fictional world. Instead of directly asking your students to study the life cycle of a snail, you can turn your students into investigative reporters, snail specialists on the journey of a lifetime to discover the lifespan of a snail, and now what you’ve done with that theatrical framework is you’ve taken the answers and made them less pressured. For the student, if they get the answer wrong, it’s not necessarily them. It’s Chip Chipperson’s snail expert who got the answer wrong. And Chip Chipperson needs to figure out what’s true about snails and what’s not true about snails.
One of the sort-of oldest theories about fiction is that fiction is a way to learn in a sort of “consequence-free,” environment. Where the mistake takes place, any mistake you make, takes place within that fictional frame, within that theatrical frame, so you can correct it within that theatrical frame before you step back into reality.
If you want to put on a play about 1776 and what happened in 1776, you do your research about the play, and then you figure out the way to tell the story. You can’t just tell the story out of nowhere. You have to do the research first. It’s unavoidable to learn something about what happened in 1776. If you want to put on a sketch about the lifespan of a snail, well, first you have to figure out what the lifespan of a snail is, and then you get the fun of dressing up one of your friends as a snail to wander around and talk about its lifespan.
You not only have built learning into the fun, you’ve made mistakes a little more consequence-free because it’s all in that sort of playful thing, but also simply putting a playful learning framework around it. It becomes more motivating. Because yeah, you have to do all the research into the lifespan of a snail, just like you would have had to do anyway, but at the end, you get to put horns on your teacher and have her wander around acting like a snail - and who doesn’t want to do that to their teacher, right?
I think this is, for me, the magic sauce of theatre in education is that a play is always about something. A play is about emotion. It’s about relationships. It’s about culture and what culture does to people. It’s about how we understand ourselves. It’s about coming of age. It’s about loss. It’s about harm. Or, it’s about the lifespan of a snail. It’s about what happened at a constitutional convention. And it’s about, you know, climbing a tree for the first time.
I think the tools of theatre, the toolbox of theatre can be applied because what you need is the human and the human’s knowledge. And you don’t need much more than that to make the representational space of theatre.
Desi Sharpe
Excellent, yes. It’s in that play, kind of nexus, where something extremely challenging can also be fun and doesn’t detract from the educational element of it in any way. It actually creates space, like you say, for the exploration, the mistake-making that’s necessarily involved, less personal because it’s like a whole separate agentic thing unto itself.
Thalia Goldstein
Framed in acting classes and acting exercises – and I do think when teachers are using theatrical techniques in their classroom, it is important to build that box, to build that framework, that safe space, that brave space, whatever you want to call it – it’s really important to set off: “Now we’re pretending. Now we’re done pretending”. This is important for little, little kids when you’re doing pretend play with them. Like now we’re going to pretend and now we’re all done pretending and we need to like eat for real. We can’t pretend to eat anymore; we have to actually eat.
The same thing happens in school settings where, okay, now we’re stepping into the world of pretend, and out. Acting teachers over many, many years of teaching classes have developed the method for this. They’ve developed the warmup exercises that people do when they’re first starting out in an acting class. There’s improvisational games so that you learn how to make a mistake, shake it off and move to the next one. Make a mistake, shake it. You didn’t get a laugh? Try a different joke. You didn’t get a laugh? Try a different joke.
That’s an actual acting exercise that I saw over and over again in my data collection, which is like, you put someone at the center of the room, they have to make people laugh and they just try 25 different things until everyone starts laughing. So it’s building trial-and-error and mistake-making into the warmup. Then, as you enter into the space of doing your real work, your snail sketch or your 1776 sketch, then the mistakes are inherent to it. So, we’ve already come to a collaborative agreement that like, if you say something foolish, it doesn’t matter because we move on from that and we go do something else.
I think that that is often something that people forget, which is like you do have to formally set up the safe space and the brave space and that those silly exercises, those thoughtless exercises, those games, like that’s the purpose of the game. The purpose of the game is to build the ensemble, build the community, and build the norm around mistake-making and the norm around trying something that might feel a little bit scary. Then when you go into the work, when you go into the storytelling, when you go into the learning part of it, you don’t have to worry about that stuff. You can just focus on the storytelling.
Desi Sharpe
Speaking of storytelling and games, we did have questions about the “Not All Games Play the Same” paper. So, specifically looking at elements of video games that may be associated with creative thinking, creative behavior. I would love to hear how you kind of walked your way over there and explain a little bit about what you found, and what you think it might mean for the future, since video games are not going away.
Thalia Goldstein
No, they’re not.
I love that you asked about this paper. Yeah, so this is my fabulous student, Darian Stapleton. This is her dissertation work that she recently finished with her PhD [congratulations to Darian!]. I sort of joke that my lab is for all the arts misfits. Like, if you are interested in anything having to do with the arts and creativity and play and social-emotional skills, come on in. I’ll take you, come learn. Let’s learn together.
And so Darien came in with a visual arts background and a psychology major, but also a real interest in the broadness of video games, which has been missing from the psychology conversation. When you think about the way in which most parents hear about the psychology of video games, they’re only hearing about aggression. They’re only hearing about these horrible possibilities. If your child plays video games, watch out, be scared, right?
But the truth is that, as I said before, it’s not a monolith. Video games are not a monolith. There are video games that have no humans in them at all and you’re just clicking boxes. There are video games in which you are working collaboratively online to like, build a farm. There are video games where you are open and exploring a world and there’s no life or death and there’s no weapons anywhere to be found and you’re just like putting pictures on walls.
So video games have as many genres and as many playthroughs and as many possibilities as TV shows. If you love horror and you want to go like watch horror television shows, there is a channel for you to go watch that. And if you want to watch people bake cakes, there’s many channels for you to watch that and if you want to watch ridiculous sitcoms where none of these events would ever happen and it was all a big misunderstanding, there’s space for you to go watch that, too!
So, as many genres as we have in other forms of entertainment and media, that’s where video games have gone, too, because of course people want to have lots of options when they engage in entertainment and in media.
We’ve known for a long time about serious games and educational games, and those have become more and more integrated into education and academia and schooling systems for better and for worse. There are high-quality educational games, and then there are games that are maybe labeled as educational that really don’t abide by best practices in teaching and learning.
For commercially available games, what Darian and I were particularly interested in is how could we harness commercially available games – which we know are intrinsically motivating, because if they weren’t intrinsically motivating, they wouldn’t be bestselling games; like, this is where industry has already done like tons of the work because they have figured out what makes a game intrinsically motivating, ‘what do people like?’, ‘what do they want to play?’, ‘what do they find interesting?’ – what we did was put a creativity lens on these commercially available games.
There had been some work before theorizing creativity in video games and thinking about it, but no one had yet broken down what are the elements of video games that might be associated with creativity. This was really a first step in running some research and some actual experiments on how kids think about creativity in video games, how do they play video games creatively, and then how do they judge other kids’ creativity within video games.
It’s this idea that if you have a genre of video game that’s very ‘open-world’ and rewards trying new things, you’re gonna play that game more creatively than if you have a video game that has a strict narrative and you just need to sort of click a button, click a button. That’s gonna be the least creative. Somewhere in the middle is a game like some of the newer Zelda games that have problems that you have to solve, but the most obvious solution is not going to get you there. You actually have to come up with … like in a classic creativity task, like the classic candle matchstick box task or what have you … you have to come up with the secondary solution, the creative solution, instead of the most obvious one.
That was really what we were exploring in this paper was: “How can we conceptualize the ways in which video games vary – because of the commercial need for video games, or the commercial desire for video games – how can we see how they vary naturally and how are those elements linked to creative thought, creative process, and creative outcomes for the people that play them?”
Anna Abraham
Yeah, so cool. I mean, I’ve always been fascinated by, I love games of all sorts, but I am very interested in that kind of work because, like you said, it’s intrinsically motivating. People are taking time out of their day to go do something, huge amounts of time, ridiculous amounts of time - I wonder if you could just kind of … even if you haven’t done the studies yet … to hypothesize about perhaps two kinds of people with what they do at leisure time.
So some are exploring, and let’s say they’re exploring the types of games that are at least enabling some level of creative problem solving or expression of some kind. And compare this kind of very intrinsically motivated play that can potentially go on for long time … three hours, four hours a day … which is what a lot of people do. And then there’s the other sort who is just more passive in the engagement, doing something that is very playful, very fun, very entertaining, but doesn’t involve you contributing anyway. You’re sort of on TikTok, just scrolling video after video after video.
And I’m wondering if you could speak to, in some ways, I think people should be probably advocating more for games because our need for entertainment to use our leisure time to keep ourselves entertained and cater to our well-being in some way … there are worse and worse options of what you could do. And so I would love your take on – I call this kind of “pseudo-flow” – which is like sometimes you have some aspects of the flow experience of feeling absorbed, time distortion and so on. Like when you’re binge watching a show or, know, I’m guilty as charged. I will put up my hand for all this, but you leave it not feeling productive. That feeling kind of like an empty shell sometimes, especially with some things.
I’m wondering if we can make the creativity or the capacity to sort of do something a little more engaging involves a little more of yourself and is something that we shouldn’t be looking at work versus play? Like it’s essentially within play, there’s ways in which you can play, your attention is what all these things are demanding and your time is what all these things are demanding. So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to active versus passive … watching play versus actually playing.
Thalia Goldstein
Yeah, well, I think the everything old is new again, right? Because there have been these sorts of … moral panic is maybe too strong of a word … but I’m not actually convinced it is too strong of a word. But this idea of like, television is so passive, radio is so passive, reading is so passive… I think one of the things that happens is never underestimate the pull of the new, when it’s something you haven’t seen before.
But I do think we know there are individual differences in openness to experience as a personality trait that are linked to creative engagement and creative outcomes. And then we also know there are individual differences in need for cognition, which is how complex do you want the world to be and how complex do you want things to happen. And I think it’s a muscle like any other muscle.
If you have been just sort of fed the easy cognition of an endless scroll of videos, right, where some of the videos are like, “I had a problem and here’s how I solved it”, which is when you actually are trained in putting things on social media … that’s how we all have sort of learned this language … you say “here’s a pain point, pay attention to me, now I’m gonna solve it. Here’s a pain point, pay attention to me, and now I’m gonna solve it”.
That makes the watcher feel like they’re learning things. But it’s passive because it’s not the active problem solving yourself. It gives you the instant openness of cognition, but then it solves the problem for you very, very quickly.
I think that what that does is it feeds us without filling us. But you sort of after an hour of scrolling, you still feel kind of empty because you haven’t actually learned anything, but you sort of felt like you were on the edge of learning a bunch of things very quickly. With video games, again, not a monolith, but with any kind of game where you are being asked to make choices, solve problems, engage.
One thing I am really interested in is tabletop role-playing games and D&D, because there’s also a social communication element to those kinds of games. There’s a shared, what I called it in a paper that I wrote with Rohan Kapitany was “shared pretensive reality,” where you all have entered into this shared pretend space and we have agreed to what the rules are and now we’re going to engage in it. And I think what that does is it makes it harder to solve the problems, right? It takes more time to solve the problems, it requires more cognition to solve the problems. I think it is harder to convince people that the work is good for you. You’re still getting that taste as if you’re learning new things when you’re scrolling a bunch of videos, because that’s how social media knows how to capture you, but you’re not actually fulfilling the need for cognition yourself or fulfilling the openness to experiences for yourself. You’re letting someone else do it for you.
I think probably people who are already higher on openness to experience and need for cognition are going to be more likely to drift towards active learning stuff and game playing stuff and away from social media, but I also think we’re fighting against people who are companies and creators who are tapping into just enough of it to hook you but not enough so that you question it. I feel this even in myself. I can’t tell you … I have deleted social media off of my phone, I have put time blockers on my computer. Yet, when I want to feel just active enough but not have to work too hard, that’s exactly where I go. Because we’ve done a really good job of convincing ourselves that this is enough for us and I wish I had a better answer than that, to be honest with you.
Anna Abraham
Yeah. I think it’s almost physiological. It’s sort of like the brain wants entertainment and we like amusement. We like to enter those spaces. We would like to see fun things. We’re interested in the world around us. We want to see what other people are doing. We’re naturally curious, and if you can get a lot without having to actually engage, it’s just an extra exertion of energy, to get out a board game, call some people. It’s just a little more. So, it’s like that path of least resistance thing, which is like, “Can I cook myself a great meal or can I just call someone and have it delivered? I love food. I like food that tastes good. And this just takes a way more effort.”
Thalia Goldstein
Yeah … I was also going to say from the biological perspective, there’s also the variable ratio reward of social media. From a basic learning perspective, from a biological learning perspective, the hardest way to break up with a stimulus is by every now and then you get a reward, but it’s not consistent and you never know when it’s gonna happen. And that is absolutely the experience to social media, which is like, okay, well, I didn’t like the last 12 videos that I saw, but maybe this 13th one is gonna be the one that makes me laugh, right?
Anna Abraham
That’s true. It’s like gambling.
Thalia Goldstein
It is, it absolutely is. So here’s the thing that’s most interesting to me – and this is work I want to do, but have not started to do yet, so if anyone out there wants to steal this idea and do the work, please do, because I really want to know what the answer is.
I think social media is scratching the arts itch in a way that we all desperately want.
But as the arts have been taken systematically out of our schools, as they have been removed from public culture, as they have been turned into paywalled, expensive … I mean, it is hard to make a living as an artist and it is expensive to buy art or look at art. Museums do a good job trying to pull more people in, but it is expensive. Like streaming services are getting more and more expensive, going to the theatre is extremely expensive, going to the orchestra, listening to a concert. So as the arts have disappeared from the public sphere, we don’t have a lot of kitchen music anymore, right? Like music used to be you got together with your friends and family and played in the kitchen. Theatre used to be one traveling troupe that went around to all the different villages.
Social media is artistic. It is aesthetic. It is often quite beautiful. There’s a whole genre of social media about beauty and about beautiful faces. There’s a whole genre of social media about aesthetic houses and turning your food into a work of art. Half of social media are skits: comedy skits, drama skits, recreation skits, short narratives. Everything has a music background. Everything uses music to up the aesthetic experience of social media.
Social media has replaced theatre. It has replaced music. It has replaced visual arts. TikTok is a dance app, right? So if you look at the arts as disappearing from the public sphere, they’ve disappeared from the public sphere and they show up all over the place on social media, except we don’t call it “art” there.
I think people want the arts. I think people want it. I think they want expression. I think they want aesthetics. I think they want beauty. I think they want that connection. I think they want to know what other people are thinking and feeling. I think they want to make meaning out of their world and make meaning out of this social experience that we’re all having.
That is part of the reason why social media is so successful.
Because what is influencing if not to present us with the most aesthetically pleasing version of a life that we could have? What is comedy online if not like a little theatre skit done in 30 seconds? A little TikTok dance done in 30 seconds? So we have taken a night at the ballet and turned it into a 20-second TikTok dance. We have taken a work of theatre and turned it into a 20 -second Instagram reel that has a little kick at the end, right? It’s hard to make a narrative that you can get in 25 seconds, but content creators have gotten really really good at it.
So, this is like a an idea I’ve had for a long time that I really want to do some studies on, which is if you’re given choice between the more difficult version of buying the ticket and going to the dance show and making meaning out of a 25-minute piece of choreography and reading the dramatological history of what it is that you’re watching and understanding the effort and the work that it took and that’s why your ticket cost $100 or what have you … or if you sit at home and watch two-and-a-half hours of TikTok dances. Like, is that fulfilling some inherent need for the arts that we don’t talk about anymore because the arts have been so systematically removed from our educational and public spheres?
Anna Abraham
Yeah, I think that was all absolutely beautifully said. And also, I think part of the TikTok, I think what you said right from the start, which is that it scratches the itch that we have from wanting the arts. And also, I love your use of the word “brave space” earlier and the use of the phrase "brave space and safe space kind of interchangeably. And I think what all of social media allows you, especially if you’re being passive and just watching and listening, is the safest safe space, right?
You can engage in the kind of things that you couldn’t perhaps tell your friends about. Let’s say you are with people who are of a certain bend and you actually love, let’s think of, I don’t know, boxing, but you don’t have, you couldn’t possibly say that to your friends because they’d think you’re an idiot or something. But you can engage with this very passively. It provides a lot of safe spaces in which to enter things that you don’t want anyone to know that you like.
I think it allows you the means if you can’t afford to go, a lot of people can’t afford to go to the theatre or think of it as, “it has all of these social connotations to it, like who goes to that and who goes to this” and all of that. I think it just it solves some problems, the accessibility issues there. The itch, of course, like you said, but also just allowing people to peer in.
I would actually love a related study to that, which explores how one’s use of social media tracks with one’s openness. Are you just going in for what is readily available …what your feed is going to give you … what it thinks you like, or whatever? Or how much are you intentionally seeking out stuff beyond the feed? You hear something and you might tell your friends, “yeah, that sucks”, and then you’re going out and actually looking it up. You’re actually curious about it. It allows you to explore your forbidden curiosity.
In some ways, I think these mediums, if I were to give it a positive spin, in a world where there is so much risk aversion, and that’s a problem when it comes to creativity, because it necessarily involves risk. If you’re in this completely socially embedded world where everyone sees what you post and you’re completely at the mercy of other people approving what you do to feel validated, we’re making it harder and harder for people to be different, to stand out, to risk take, to do something that, your know, could even …
Desi Sharpe
Fail?
Anna Abraham
Exactly. And I think in some ways the landscape of our world has changed so much and that social media is no longer what it used to be. Facebook used to be somewhere where you could have gone to first to check out what other people are doing and spy on your old friends or ex-partners or whatever, you know? But now it’s increasingly becoming a space, where you can actually look information up. We’re all in bubbles of our own, but everyone assumes we’re in our bubbles only. But the truth is that you can, if you want, go out of it much more easily than you could physically do without losing your friends. There are some catastrophic consequences people face … and I hear this from students … from even questioning the status quo of what that group believes. “Are you on this side of the aisle? Then don’t you dare question anything on our side of the aisle.” If you do, we don’t want to be around you. You’re not going to be invited to things.
Desi Sharpe
Yeah, don’t talk about it, at least.
Anna Abraham
The stigma attached to curiosity. I mean, outside the world of high art and stuff, which I think everyone would agree, yes, it’s good to experience this type of concert, but other things where it’s really about learning new things that might go against the grain – I think in some ways the less explored thing is, even on social media, what are people looking at? And do some personality factors change that?
Thalia Goldstein
I think there’s two things that that makes me think of; the first is that sometimes social media will show you stuff that you don’t even know that you’re interested in because you watched that video for half a second longer than you watched the other video. Now all of a sudden, the algorithm is learning that what you like is video type A and not video type B and so now it’s feeding you some videos type A to see if you keep looking at them for longer. What that does though, is it also sort of feeds the most baseline emotionally activating stuff.
We know study after study has shown that the most anger inducing posts get the most likes and the most engagement and are seen by the most people. The most extreme voices are the ones most amplified online because they’re the ones that are activating everybody else.
It can be good because it can show you stuff that you might not otherwise get access to, or it can inform you about stuff that you might be interested in that you didn’t realize, but there’s this dark side to it, too, where the most emotionally activating stuff is going to be the stuff we pay more attention to.
But it also can be – this actually goes back to your thought about brave space and safe space – it can also be a real lifesaver for people who need to find others who have the same experience that they do: Does anybody else feel this way? Does anybody else think this way?
If you’re in a fairly closed community … to find the community of people … you used to have to move to a different city.
You have to like, like, I didn’t know until I was 27 that anybody else around me, you know … like, you hear this from LGBTQIA people all the time, right? People who are in their 50s or 60s didn’t know anybody else who was gay until they were in their 30s. Now it’s very publicly available, but also you can find it online really, really quickly.
The thing about the difference between safe space and brave space is this risk and vulnerability thing, which is a “safe space” is a place where you are accepted, but nothing is required of you necessarily. You can explore or not explore as much as you want to. Many of the theatre teachers that I have spoken to have started to prefer the term “brave space” because brave space requires that you like risk and that you venture.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. You have to put yourself out there a little bit. You have to be playful or release your inhibitions or show a face that you wouldn’t have otherwise shown in order to then reap the rewards of the safe space.
So I think safe space is a great term when the idea is almost a little bit more like come as you are, and wherever you are is great, and there will be no further questions.
Brave space from an educational perspective then has another question for you: “So what do you do now? Like what are you gonna risk now? What are you gonna try now? What are you gonna push on now?”
Anna Abraham
Yeah, and I think getting back to theatre then, think what’s really unusual, but again, I’m very biased because I was a theatre kid …
Thalia Goldstein
We’re everywhere, we’re everywhere.
Anna Abraham
We’re infecting the world! I think what’s interesting about theatre compared to a lot of the [other arts], and I love all of the other arts as well, you know, but it’s that there is something about the way you use all of the things we’ve been talking about. Your imagination has to be used there.
So if you’re playing music, for instance, you might decide, and it’s beautiful and it’s wonderfully sort of to engage in it, of course, but you might decide not to just try to perfect yourself. I’m just thinking about when I was much younger, every time I was just trying to make things better. I never got to a stage where I was like, “I can now express myself better.” Like, you know, “I can bring out what the way I see it.” That’s such a high bar that you have to get to such a level of expertise before you can do that or you’re composing or something.
But there’s something about theatre where I think it allows one to enter the imaginative space, the ‘what if’ space, almost more than the other art forms in a sense that anyone at any level can do it without needing much, as you said so beautifully; it’s about people, it’s about psychology, it’s about you’re playing a version of something you might be familiar with, or you’re bringing your familiarity into it.
I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about how that feels. It is automatically a kind of brave space because you are trying to be something else. And again, it might afford a nice platform in which the safe and the brave meet rather well together. You get safe to make mistakes, but you still have to do something with the safety. Also how that experience of it just makes you – a lot of your work is focused on social skills development, emotional regulation – essentially, how pretending to be somebody else or something else actually caters to your own skills, your own emotional regulation. I was wondering if you speak to the power of that imaginative capacity.
Thalia Goldstein
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things that is really interesting about theatre is that it asks for improvisation and sort of physical engagement in the art from day one, from moment one, and that it is not always about performance. I think that a theatre classroom is necessarily different than a rehearsal room where you’ve been cast in a role and you then play that role and then you perform that role and then you move on. Or you perform that role for years and years and years and that’s the role and you’re known for that role.
What happens in a theatre room, what happens in an acting classroom, is you are asked to think about the multitudes that you can inhabit. You are asked to perform a range of emotions. You are asked to perform a range of situations.
And because I’m reminded of this great quote by Alan Rickman, the actor who played Severus Snape, he was in Die Hard, and he played many different roles in many different movies and television shows. He was once asked by a group of students, like, “How do you play the villain over and over again? Like how do you do that? Don’t you get tired of that? Isn’t that a problem?” And his response was, “I’ve never played a villain in my life. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t play villains. I play people who have motivations. I play people who are trying to accomplish goals, just like the hero is. The hero is also trying to accomplish the goal. We’re all just trying to accomplish goals”.
I think that quote is such a key quote to theatre and to acting. Because if you are cast as the villain, you’re cast as the angry one, you’re cast as the hero, you’re cast as the bumbling idiot, you’re cast as the princess, … the fullness of the humanity of those characters in an acting class, you have to discover that for many different characters, for many different situations, for many different emotions. We talk about perspective -taking and walking a mile in someone’s shoes – that’s literally what you’re doing in acting class, sometimes in the actual shoes of the character. And so, like any psychological skill, practice is helpful. If you are practicing what sadness and happiness look like, if you’re practicing what it means to be the hero and the villain, if you’re practicing the motivation for breaking up with someone and the heartbreak for being broken up with, if you’re practicing the horror of losing a child as a mother and then also, you know, the recklessness of a teenager doing something sort of crazy …
If you get to practice all of those things in a physicalized way, saying the words out loud, you are learning the motivations for all of it. You are learning the reasons why. You are seeing how it might feel on your body if you were to do it, and in your mouth, if you were to say those words.
I think there is a way in which social skills are about the depth with which you can commune with another person. It’s about “can I understand what you’re going through? Can I collaboratively experience what you’re going through? Can I engage with my own sense of self and my own emotions in order to connect with what you’re going through?”
I think that acting class asks students to do that a hundred different times for a hundred different characters. You can’t help but then when approached with someone new in the real world, go: “Well, what are you going through? I can understand that. I have experienced something similar to that.” That’s where I think the transition from inside the fictional space to outside the fictional space can happen.
Desi Sharpe
Absolutely, I love that description about communing with another as part of the empathy component that you speak about, and also emotional regulation because if you are able to put on a cloak of someone else, you’re also able to understand something new or a different perspective or a motivation without it making you so confused and stressed out, uncertain about what’s going to happen.
It’s like you, even if you are not a villain, the practice of the things that we characterize as ‘villainous’ allows you to go, “well, what is a villain then really? Like, that’s someone else’s determination. I understand my motivations for what I’m doing” I just really love that. I also love your focus on emotional regulation, because it seems so much more important now than ever for younger and younger age groups. Particularly given the anxiety that young people walk around with all time.
We are kind of nearing the end of our time here, but Anna and I would really love to hear about some work you have on the horizon, where you’re thinking of going.
Thalia Goldstein
I love the thought of emotion regulation. That’s actually the direction I’m going in right now. Theatre is such a physicalized art form and emotions happen in the body – anger is in the body, sadness is in the body. Literally, emotions are us reading our own body states and then putting a word to what it is we’re feeling. That’s what I’m studying right now.
We just finished a yearlong data collection at an elementary school with students who have done their very first theatre classes for their very first time. We interviewed them, all these kids from kindergarten to sixth grade (very fun interviews), we interviewed them about their emotion regulation. We interviewed them about their feelings, about safe space and brave space. We interviewed them about how they felt about their acting classes and a time they felt nervous, but were able to overcome it.
Then collaboratively with that set of interviews, we have academic report cards, we have teacher rubrics about how the teacher sort of saw each of the students in the theatre classroom, we have some parent reports on how the parents saw their kids change over time… we’re really going to be able to do this in-depth analysis of these kids who had never experienced a theatre class before, have now experienced a theatre class, and we’re going to be able to get both in their own words and then also from this more standardized observer way looking at how they’re doing and what they might be doing for them.
So continuing trying to figure out what is it the theatre class does for kids and how can we get really specific about the outcomes that we care about and the outcomes that are truly happening in the theatre class. So, I’m excited for those data.
Anna Abraham
Sounds amazing. I think it’s just incredible to take this kind of systemic approach to it, it is beautiful.
I have one last question before you go. You’re one of the few people who’ve had a unique distinction of being the editor of the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (PACA). I think it’s a really unique view you get as an editor of what are people studying, what seem to be the things people are curious about, what are you excited about? So, can you give us some big picture stuff that you see that has changed over the eight years, or that you’re excited about in the future in the field of creativity, aesthetics, and the arts?
Thalia Goldstein
Yeah, that’s such a great question. So, you know, I think people have gotten way better at measurement. I think that, you know, the advances in measuring creativity in a variety of ways and then also analytical techniques being applied to aesthetic reasoning and creativity have just really advanced over the last eight years. In fact, before I was editor, I was an associate editor, and before I was an associate editor, I was on the editorial board. So, I’ve been with the journal for almost 20 years at this point, which is wild.
I think the thing that we’re still working on is getting out of just ‘high art’ as being the only kind of art that we study. These have been some of the coolest papers that I’ve seen come through in the last couple of years: papers on busking and how we understand busking, papers on child art (I always love to see kids making art), papers that really look at sort of the therapeutic approaches to art and how do we use art in drama therapy and in art therapy and not just in the traditional 1970s way, but in modern therapeutic techniques.
I think getting away from the like ‘how do you respond when you listen to Beethoven’ as the only thing we care about is really exciting. Getting out of just the museum and onto the streets for street art and street murals … that’s a direction that I think is really cool and I think really speaks to the way that people now engage with the arts. Going back to my social media stuff: “How do we now get to engage with and explore the arts and aesthetics and creativity in our everyday lives?” That’s stuff I’m really excited to see.
Anna Abraham
Yeah, that’s so cool. Well, congratulations on your tenure there and thank you for your service because that is a hard, hard job.
Thalia Goldstein
I enjoyed it a lot and I’m happy to let other people take over for now.
Anna Abraham
Well, thank you so much, Thalia, for this wonderful conversation. We could keep talking to you forever, I think. It is so wonderful to see how theatre caters to so much more than just the stage. Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been incredibly valuable for us.
Desi Sharpe
Absolutely. Yes, thank you.
Thalia Goldstein
Thank you. This was so fun, thanks so much.
For more information about Thalia Goldstein, please visit her webpage.
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