Being entertained is important for humans. Being entertained is thought to be an evolutionary measure that improved human’s social abilities. One example of how being entertained influences social processes is when looking at the love for storytelling. When getting invested in a story, people tend to take the perspective of characters within the stories. This is a form of imitation. The ability to take the perspective of other people allows humans to act more socially appropriate, and is thus an important mechanism to improve social processes.
This form of imitation might be based on mirror neurons, which are neurons that imitate behaviors we see in other people, such as feeling pain when you see a video of someone breaking an arm.
Our ability to get entertained may therefore be a mechanism that encourages behavior that is beneficial for social behavior.
Entertainment may also be beneficial for cognitive abilities. If we return to the example of storytelling, it has been seen to benefit memorization of information. The best memorizers in the world can remember the order of hundreds of cards, and the strategy they use is storytelling. They construct a story, where the order they have to remember is represented by things associated with the object they have to remember.
