Going straight with chess

The UK has approximately 97,700 prisoners, a figure projected to rise to 114,200 by 2027 (House of Commons, 2024), reflecting one of the highest rates of incarceration in western Europe (World Prison Brief 2024). Men make up around 96 per cent of that population, with the gender imbalance even shifting further since the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, another androcentric culture has been booming: the world of chess. Indeed, demand for online play recently crashed the servers of the world's largest online chess site (Chess.com, 2023).

This article is about the psychology at the intersection of these two growing cultures. We are volunteer chess coaches in UK prisons with the charity Chess in Schools and Communities. In the past six years our charity has built up a team of 20 coaches who jointly deliver weekly chess club experiences to approximately 120 prisoners in ten prisons. We run chess clubs in women's and in men's prisons, typically affording two hours of chess play and instruction a week. As in other chess clubs, the format varies from place to place depending on the skills and interests of the chess players that make these clubs up. 

But do prison chess clubs deliver any psychological benefit to prisoners, the prison systems that they inhabit, or to the wider society from which these prisoners are currently segregated? We argue that getting the measure of such questions requires psychologists to conceptualise chess as a meaningful social activity rather than just as a domain of cognitive expertise. Taking chess to prison and back to society may also liberate psychologists' concepts of human chess players from current cognitive constraints. 

Chess as cognitive enhancement

One line of thinking suggests that chess could have transformative effects in prison because it functions as a kind of cognitive training, defined by Gobet and Sala (2023, p.126) as 'interventions using cognitive tasks or intellectually demanding activities, the goal of which is to enhance general cognitive ability'. Some advocates of prison chess claim that chess enhances cognition, leading prisoners to better decisions, insights, and life choices; 'the skills and disciplines learned on a chess board can be instantly transferred to life outside of the prison' (Portman, 2024, p.5). Dr Lance Griggs, who runs the Chess for Life programme that provides weekly chess clubs to at-risk youth in Alberta Canada, similarly claims that chess has 'key features that can help individuals learn how to make better decisions, think more carefully about consequences of actions before taking them' (Anon, 2018). 

No psychological studies exist that directly test the effects of prison chess as cognitive enhancement per se. However, findings on other forms of chess instruction might inspire caution. In a meta-analysis of 24 empirical studies of the effect of chess tuition on school-aged children, the overall effect on children's mathematics, reading, and other cognitive performance was small-to-moderate (Hedge's g = 0.338), below 0.4, the 'zone of desired effects' for effective educational interventions (Sala & Gobet, 2016). In two well-controlled experiments chess tuition had no effect on mathematical ability or metacognition over regular schoolwork or time spent playing checkers or go (Sala & Gobet, 2017a). Sala and Gobet (2016) suggested that extraneous factors, such as chess instructors' passion, may have contributed to the moderate effects of chess tuition on children's performance in other domains. They concluded that there is a 'stark contrast between the enthusiasm displayed by the chess community and the sobering results from research on transfer and expertise' (Sala & Gobet, 2017a, p.419).

Whilst we are enthusiastic members of the chess community who are trying to create positive change in prison, we do find this research to be clear-headed. If chess delivers only moderate cognitive enhancement among children steered toward educational enrichment, what hope do we then have of using chess to improve the life decisions of the prisoners? 

However, prison chess is not only – or even primarily – about cognitive enhancement or direct analogical transfer from chess tactics to other domains. To develop this argument, we will draw an analogy to chess from a more familiar domain: sport. 

Chess as sporting culture

Sports have cultures, such as 'football culture', for example. Chess has a social context every bit as much as football does. Researchers have asked if prison sport programmes deliver benefits to prisoners' health and well-being, and to prisoners' behaviour in prison and after release (Gallant et al., 2015). Most studies of the effects of prison sports programmes show psychological benefit in one of these domains, but it is difficult to isolate any direct effects of sports per se, because prisoners often experience sports as part of larger motivation programs that provide the sports' social contexts (Woods et al., 2017). In other words, these programs may work because they take sporting cultures to prison and not just sport per se. Such effects are psychologically and socially important in prisons, even if studies of individually cognitive enhancement might disregard them as 'extraneous' factors to very direct analogical transfer effects with which those cognitive studies are concerned. 

There are clear grounds for exploring the benefits of improving the availability of chess and other sports in UK prisons and for researching their benefits. Psychologist Rosie Meek's (2018) review of UK prison sports programmes described an uneven landscape of sporadic success, within which prison chess clubs were a pocket of good practice. She concluded that prison chess clubs not only make education and employment more accessible to prisoners but 'reduce violence and conflict, develop communication and other skills, and promote positive use of leisure time'. 

Meek's (2018) review particularly pointed to the work of self-proclaimed 'prison chess crusader' Carl Portman who has written a chess column in the prison newspaper Inside Time for a decade. Portman (2024) has published excerpts from many prisoners' letters to him to evidence his faith in the benefits of his work in making chess culture available to prisoners through this publication. For instance, one letter to Portman focused on mental health: 'I suffer from depression, anxiety, and paranoia so chess helps alleviate these symptoms by keeping my mind active and it gives me something to look forward to every day' (Portman, 2024, p.9). Another refers to the internalisation of prison discipline: 'After five minutes huffing, puffing and fist-clenching even the angriest man realises he cannot take his anger out on his opponent. His ego is in turmoil trying to blame his error on someone else. Slowly, acceptance creeps in and he has to own his mistakes" (Portman, 2024, p.9). Still others show the anticipation of life after prison in which chess will play a positive role, for instance: 'I will join a club when I am out. Hopefully I can get an online coach and I would love to go to a tournament someday" (Portman, 2024, p.19). 

In other words, prisoners' letters to Portman speak to the three areas which researchers have privileged when looking at the effects of sports programmes in prison – mental health, prison discipline, and avoiding re-offending. Meek (2018) noted further that chess is cheap and can be carried on inside the cell – unlike football! Not all prisoners will find chess meaningful, of course. But some come to prison with experience of the joy of the game's challenges, whilst others discover in prison that this time-demanding pastime is a way of 'doing time'. Some of you may know that chess players were among the first groups shown to experience optimal flow states in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work. Fewer may know that Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow was informed by his experience of playing chess as a child, with adults, in an Italian prisoner of war camp (Flaste, 1989).

Becoming a chess player, building the basis for desistance

Beyond helping the prisoner to serve time, how might chess culture help a prisoner to avoid crime after release? In criminological theory, desistence refers to how offenders come to desist from criminal behaviour – or 'go straight' (Maruna & Farrell, 2004). Desistance is a process, not an isolated decision at one point in time, and it has three steps: (1) a cessation in offending behaviour, that could be forced by perhaps incarceration; (2) a shift in the offender's sense of self and the development of a non-criminal self-narrative, and (3) wider societal recognition of the desister as non-criminal and the building of pro-social bonds. 

Desistance is not a single event or point in time. An offender may experience many false stops and starts before finally desisting fully from crime. But sports and arts in prisons can support the second step in desistance by immersing prisoners in social activities that allow a shift in the sense of self. In their influential work on desistence, criminologists Maruna and Farrall (2004, p. 187), noted that the importance of prisoners finding 'a source of agency and communion in non-criminal activities', which could be a 'calling' to 'parenthood, painting, coaching, or chess…. bringing meaning and purpose outside of crime'. Dickie-Johnson and Meek (2022) found that in music-based programmes 'music production and consumption were used to construct identity in reaction to the deconstructive effects of incarceration, leading to reported improvements in self-esteem and self-efficacy.' Diamond and Lanskey (2024) concluded that participants' experience of an art workshop in prison was of 'a unique space in which barriers and stigmatic preconceptions were broken and where a sense of acceptance, belonging, and bonding developed in a nonjudgmental atmosphere of joint creativity.'  

Prison chess also provides a social context for joint activities where positive changes to the self-concept may occur. Prisoners' letters to Portman (2024) similarly suggest that the psychological effects of chess in prisons are far-reaching and self-shaping. The charity's chess tutors treat prisoners with dignity, use first name terms, meet people as fellow chess players (not inmates), and offer prisoners a chance to build a strength in a new pursuit. For many prisoners, this may be a very different learning environment than the one that they experienced in school, albeit still one with cognitive challenge. Like other chess clubs, better studied by sociologists and anthropologists, prison chess clubs are open to all and shaped by transparent hierarchies proven by performance over the board (e.g. Desjarlais, 2011; Fine, 2015). 

Our hope is that this weekly experience – which would otherwise be spent in the cell, increasing the risk of suicide and self-harm – provides positive experiences of serious play, competition, learning from experience, teamwork, access to optimal states of consciousness, and new self-narratives. Prisoners may first play chess, then become club members, then become chess players building 'resettlement capital' preparing for release. If prisons programme such as that run by Chess in Schools and Communities deliver concrete benefits, then we believe those effects occur via the creation of a social system of joint activities, that allow the prisoner to serve their time in a context that allows for expanding concepts of the self.

Recognising more than patterns

We're into our endgame. We have argued that the cognitive framing of human chess players in psychology has limited our understanding of how the psychological effects of the effects might be nested in social contexts. To expand on an example, consider by far the most cited paper on chess in the history of psychology – the cognitive research of Chase and Simon (1973). That work showed that a more expert chess player could encode more chess pieces in short-term memory 'chunks' than the less expert player. It made 'chunking theory' the most researched topic in the psychology of chess (see Gobet, 2019, for a cogent review of subsequent developments). Now, chunking is a really valid theory. It makes sense to us as chess players. The validity of chunking theory is why we train with puzzles all the time, for example. However, pattern recognition is not the whole of the expertise of the psychology of chess. Psychologists' near exclusive interest in human chess players as thinkers that AI might emulate has pushed the phenomenological experience of chess play grounded in culture to the very periphery of the discipline's understanding of human chess players. 

Gobet and Sala (2023) argue that the failure of transfer effects from chess and other domains should lead psychologists to radically reduce our expectations about cognitive training and prompt research into computer models of very close transfers between domains such as chess and mathematics, modelled first in computer simulations and then tested in experiments. To be sure, prisoners have occasionally reported to Portman direct close transfer effects of the sort described by Gobet and Sala at the level of basic skills: 'Chess has helped me to learn how to count, especially when promoting a pawn' (Portman, 2024, p.18).  However, such transfer from chess insights from the chessboard to mathematics may be less consequential to a human chess player – imprisoned or free – than the use of chess to access flow states, participate in serious game culture with deep historical roots or experience the intensity of what anthropologist Robert Desjarlais (2011, p.32, 40). described as 'tugs of war of effort and will', and 'an interplay between relatedness and forceful violence'. 

Psychology that only recognises chess expertise as pattern recognition, to be done equivalently by humans or machines without self-understanding or needs for social connection, might understand little of the rich, phenomenological experience of becoming a chess player. As chess culture expands and diversifies, the psychology of chess must desist from patterns of representing flesh-and-blood human chess players as cognitive drosophila flies, and instead understand chess as richly social. This fleshing out of our theories of who chess players are is particularly necessary if we are to measure the develop prison chess societies that support prisoners who plays chess to successfully serve time and re-enter society upon release.

• Peter Hegarty is Professor, School of Psychology & Counselling, The Open University. [email protected]
• Ben Wicks is a former senior Civil Servant and investment professional. He was portfolio manager for several global equity funds at a major international investment firm, where he was also responsible for technology innovation. He has also worked for the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office as a senior manager. With a passion for the personal benefits of chess, Ben now devotes his time to teaching chess in prisons and fund-raising for Chess in Schools and Communities. 
• Ben Widdicombe has worked in a number of different Government Departments, including the Ministry of Justice, Crown Prosecution Service and Home Office, mostly on crime and criminal justice issues (he currently works at the Department of Health and Social Care). He has a doctorate in Criminology and and teaches criminology and criminal justice at Cambridge University. He helps run the prison chess club in HMP Brixton each week. 
• Peter Sullivan was one of the generation inspired by the Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky Match of the Century and he has been playing Club and County chess ever since. After a career in the Civil Service, at the Treasury, and in Finance, at banks such as Goldman Sachs and HSBC, Peter teamed up with Malcolm Pein in 2018 to launch the Chess in Schools and Communities Prisons program. Peter started the first club at HMP Wandsworth and now runs clubs at four prisons and oversees the national effort which currently includes fourteen prisons. Peter also coordinates the England teams for the annual FIDE InterContinental Chess Championships in which England teams have performed with distinction and been runners up twice.

References 

Anon (2018). Chess gives at-risk youth a chance. 

Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4 (1), 55-81. 

Chess.com (Jan 23rd, 2023). Chess is booming! And our servers are struggling. 

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975). Beyond boredom and anxiety. San Francisco, CA: Jossey

Desjarlais, R. R. (2011). Counterplay: An anthropologist at the chessboard. University of California Press.

Diamond, S., & Lanskey, C. (2024). An opportunity to find oneself at the end of a paintbrush: Exploration of an artist-led prison intervention model bringing people from prison and local community together. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 18(1), 3–13.

Dickie-Johnson, A., & Meek, R. (2022). A qualitative study of the rehabilitative potential of music in prisons and immigration removal centers. Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, 17(2), 140-153.

Flaste, R. (Oct 8^th, 1989). The power of concentration. New York Times, Section 6, p. 26. 

Fine, G. A. (2015). Players and pawns: How chess builds community and culture. University of Chicago Press.

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Meek, R. (2019). A sporting chance: An independent review of sport in youth and adult prisons. UK Ministry of Justice. 

Meek, R. (2018). The benefits of prison chess clubs. The Conversation. 

Portman, C. (2024). Chess in prisons and why it matters. 

Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2016). Do the benefits of chess instruction transfer to academic and cognitive skills? A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 18, 46-57.

Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2017a). Does chess instruction improve mathematical problem-solving ability? Two experimental studies with an active control group. Learning & Behavior, 45(4), 414–421.  

Woods, D., Breslin, G., & Hassan, D. (2017). A systematic review of the impact of sport-based interventions on the psychological well-being of people in prison. Mental Health and Physical Activity, 12, 50-61. 

World Prison Brief (2024). World prison brief data: Europe.