Relationships between empathy and creativity in collective games: a comparison between handball and sitting ball

In collective motor situations, creativity and empathy are central and strongly connected to cognitive and affective processes. Indeed, in the environment of high social uncertainty of games and sports, empathy would allow the player to anticipate motor behaviors in order to promote creative decision-making, i.e., to destabilize his opponents. On this basis, this study pursues two objectives. The first is to propose indicators to question the links between sociomotor empathy and motor creativity in an ecological situation. The second is to investigate the potential influence of the internal logic of two very different collective games (handball and Sitting ball) on the type of links that are woven between empathy and creativity. Two groups of students were recruited (n = 22 and 23) and participated in each of the games mentioned. The games were video recorded. The praxical communications made by each player were recorded and sorted by two trained observers. The results revealed major differences between the two studied collective games. In handball, there was a correlation between instrumental empathy (valuing cognitive aspects) and indicators of motor creativity (p  < 0.05). The more creative the players are (quantity, diversity and quality of performance), the more they manage to accurately anticipate the behavior of other players. In Sitting Ball, there was no correlation between creativity indicators and instrumental empathy. On the other hand, it is noticed that instrumental empathy was correlated with socio-affective empathy (p  < 0.001). To make their motor decisions, the players do not rely exclusively on the decoding of behaviors but significantly mobilize the feelings that they ascribe to the other co-participants. The results of this work invite reflection on the diversity of playful reading grids to be offered to students in order to develop their motor adaptability.