Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

In humans, teasing can be thought of as the stag’s roar or the frog’s croak—a ritualized, symbolic means by which group members negotiate rank. Teasing is a dramatized performance clearly preferable to the obvious alternative—violent confrontations over rank and honor. Guided by this reasoning, former student Erin Heerey and I sought to capture teasing as a ritualized status contest. The issue we confronted was how to capture these brief status contests, so prevalent in the locker rooms and dugouts and keg parties of male youth, in the laboratory. Having people write narratives about their teasing experiences would miss the very heart of the tease—the nonverbal, off-record markers that give shape to the playfulness of the tease. We could have followed the formation of social hierarchies and the role teasing plays in naturalistic groups. Ritch Savin Williams had done this in a captivating study of boys’ summer camps in the 1970s, and found, indeed, that ten-to twelve-year-old boys who were rising to the top of the hierarchy, like those dominant red deer, did indeed tease more to establish their elevated positions. But we wanted to capture the subtle, exceedingly brief nonverbal arabesques of teasing, those off-record markers, which required close-up videotaping.

In light of these interests, we developed the nickname teasing paradigm. Nicknames are a universal, linguistic marker of intimate relations that irrepressibly emerge in healthy marriages, friendships, joking relations between uncles and nieces, and work relations. Nicknames tend to home in on quirks, foibles, and deviant qualities of the target, but provoke in a loving way by violating the rules of literal communication (see examples in table below). Nicknames systematically involve exaggeration, repetition (alliteration), and metaphor (equating the individual with an animal or food, most typically). Nicknames are place holders for escapes to the world of play and pretense, where we can critique and mock in playful fashion without causing offense.

NICKNAMES FROM SPORTS AND POLITICS

       

MUHAMMAD ALI        

THE LOUISVILLE LIP        

JOE LOUIS        

THE BROWN BOMBER        

ROBERTO DURAN        

NO MÁS        

JAKE LAMOTTA        

RAGING BULL        

Y. A. TITTLE        

THE BALD EAGLE        

SHAQUILLE O’NEAL        

BIG ARISTOTLE        

KEVIN MCHALE        

THE BLACK HOLE        

JACK NICKLAUS        

THE GOLDEN BEAR        

LARRY JOHNSON        

GRANDMA MA        

BJORN BORG        

ICE BORG        

JOE BRYANT        

JELLY BEAN        

CHRIS EVERT        

LITTLE MISS POKER FACE        

KEN ROSEWALL        

MUSCLES        

JOHN ELWAY        

MR. ED        

JAROMIR JAGR        

PUFF NUTS        

KEITH WOOD        

THE RAGING POTATO        

WILLIAM PERRY        

THE REFRIGERATOR        

CHARLES BARKLEY        

THE ROUND MOUND OF REBOUND        

PAU GASOL        

THE SPANISH FLY        

ANTHONY WEBB        

SPUD        

GEORGE W. BUSH        

BUSH 43, DUBYA, THE SHRUB, UNCURIOUS GEORGE        

BILL CLINTON        

THE COMEBACK KID, THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT, SLICK WILLIE        

RICHARD NIXON        

TRICKY DICK, IRON BUTT, THE MAD MONK        

GEORGE WASHINGTON        

THE OLD FOX, THE FARMER PRESIDENT        

JOHN ADAMS        

BONNY JOHNNY, YOUR SUPERFLUOUS EXCELLENCY, HIS ROTUNDITY        

ABRAHAM LINCOLN        

HONEST ABE, THE ILLINOIS APE, THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR

Our nickname paradigm was to present participants with two randomly generated initials—A. D. or T. J. or H. F. or L. I. Participants then generated a nickname for the eventual target of the tease based on those letters, as well as an accompanying story—fact or fiction—that justified the nickname. We encouraged our participants not to worry about profanities or lewdness, notwithstanding their being videotaped; we said we weren’t going to post their videotapes on the Internet or send them to their grandmothers.

To examine how teasing functions as a status contest, I enlisted an honors student, Mike Bradley, a bright young member of a fraternity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The fraternity housed seventy-five members, tightly packed into a grand old mansion on Lake Mendota. With Mike’s help, we brought groups of four fraternity members—two high-status “actives,” who were established members of the group, and two new, low-status pledges—to the laboratory to tease one another with our newly minted nickname paradigm. They came in October, just as the group was forming its new identity amid the falling leaves and darkening trees in the upper Great Lakes fall. Fraternity members are notorious for their teasing. When told that they were participating in a study of teasing, the high-status actives licked their chops, and the low-status pledges dropped their gaze and shook their heads with a knowing smile, sensing what was coming.

The teasing flowed out of the mouths of the fraternity brothers in bursts of profane, cartoonish poetry, resembling the ritualized insults observed across history and culture. The great satirist Rabelais described nicknames used in a quarrel between cake bakers and shepherds, who playfully violated Grice’s maxims through use of exaggeration (“shit-a-beds”), repetitive alliteration (“crazy carrot-heads,” “mincing milksops”), and oblique metaphor (“poor fish”):