Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

The more subtle matter we confronted is the paradox of the playground. Scan a playground of any grammar school for fifteen minutes and you’ll see the full spectrum of teasing, its lighter, playful side as well as its darker versions. Children have an instinct for teasing. It emerges early (one British psychologist observed a cheeky nine-month-old mocking her grandmother’s snoring with a delightful imitation). As with adults, teasing can instigate and mark deep friendship. At the same time, teasing can go horribly awry. The teasing of children with obesity problems, for example, has been found to have lasting pernicious effects upon the target’s self-esteem.

What separates the productive tease from the damaging one? Data from our studies yielded four lessons about when teasing goes awry, lessons that can be put to use on the playground or in the office. A first is the nature of the provocation in the tease. Harmful teasing is physically painful and zeroes in on vulnerables aspects of the individual’s identity (for example, a young man’s romantic failures). Playful teasing is less hurtful physically, and thoughtfully targets less critical facets of the target’s identity (for example, a young man’s quirky manner of laughing). The literature on bullies bears this out: Their pokes in the ribs, noogies, and skin twisters hurt, and they tease others about taboo subjects. Not so for the artful teaser, whose teasing is lighter and less hurtful, and can even find ways to flatter in the provocation.

A second lesson pertains to the presence of the off-record markers—the exaggeration, repetition, shifts in vocalization patterns, funny facial displays. In studies of teasing we have found that the same provocation delivered with the wonderful arabesques of our nonliteral language, the off-record markers, produced little anger, and elevated love, amusement, and mirth. The same provocation delivered without these markers mainly produced anger and affront. To sort out the effective tease from the hostile attack, look and listen for off-record markers, those tickets to the realm of pretense and play.

A third lesson is one of social context. The same action—a personal joke, a critical comment, an unusually long gaze, a touch to the space between the shoulder and neck—can take on radically different meanings depending on the context. These behaviors have different meanings when coming from foe or friend, whether they occur in a formal or informal setting, alone in a room or surrounded by friends. Critical to the meaning of the tease is power. Power asymmetries—and in particular, when targets are unable through coercion or context to respond in kind—produce pernicious teasing. When I coded the facial displays of the twenty-second bursts of teasing in the fraternity study, amid the laughter and hilarity I found that over 50 percent of low-power members showed fleeting facial signs of fear, consistent with the tendency for low power to trigger a threat system—anxiety, amygdala hyperreactivity, the stress hormone cortisol—which can lead to health problems, disease, and shortened lives when chronically activated. Bullies are known for teasing in domineering ways that prevent the target from reciprocating. Teasing in romantic bonds defined by power asymmetries takes the shape of bullying. The art of the tease is to enable reciprocity and back-and-forth exchange. An effective teaser invites being teased.

Finally, we must remember that teasing, like so many things, gets better with age. Starting at around age ten or eleven, children become much more sophisticated in their abilities to endorse contradictory propositions about objects in the world—they move from Manichaean, either/or, black-or-white reasoning to a more ironic, complex understanding of the world. As a result, as any chagrined parent will tell you, they add irony and sarcasm to their social repertoire. One sees, at this age, a precipitous twofold drop in the reported incidences of bullying. And this shift in the ability to understand and communicate irony and sarcasm should shift the tenor of teasing in reliable fashion.