Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

To document this, we created an opportunity for boys at two different developmental stages to taunt one another at a basketball camp. The camp was run by my former student, aptly named John Tauer—a former Division III star small forward at the University of St. Thomas. During the camp’s morning drills, two boys, who did not know each other but were matched according to their basketball skills, were called over to play the “pressure cooker.” In this drill each camper was to try to make a free throw with the game on the line: If he made the shot, his team would win, and if he missed, his team would lose. Each camper’s partner was to act like a fan for fifteen seconds prior to the critical shot, much as NBA players must perform amid the taunting coming from the stands. In the taunt condition, the fan was given the task of messing with the shooter’s mind for fifteen seconds, to try to make him miss. In the cheer condition, the fan was to say encouraging things, to bolster the spirits of the shooter. The fan acted this out in a taped square that measured two feet by two feet and was located at the end of the left side of the free-throw line, a couple feet away from the shooter.

Sure enough, our subjects acted like besotted NBA fans. The taunters made more than ten times as many harsh gestures as those cheering their peers on. The taunters pointed and stuck out their tongues, they growled and snarled, they glared like alpha apes. The cheering fans, in contrast, took their cue straight out of a self-esteem handbook: They were five times as likely to shout encouraging things, to clap, and to cheer the shooter on. And there, in the fifteen-second episode of taunting, and only in the taunting, we saw the exquisite use of off-record markers. The taunters, and only the taunters, shifted their pitch, taunting in very high or low tones, they resorted to repetition (“you’re gonna miss, you’re gonna miss, you’re gonna miss), and they used basketball metaphors (“brick” “choke”) that were absent in the more sincere cheer condition.

The fourteen-to fifteen-year-old boys taunted with just as much hostile behavior—the finger points and harsh vocalizations—as the ten-to eleven-year-old boys, but the older boys’ taunting was accompanied much more frequently by off-record markers—repetition, shifts in vocalizations, metaphors—that signaled the presence of play. And to good effect. Our older campers, deft taunters that they were, were more likely than the older boys in the cheer condition to report their partner as a new friend. In the aftermath of the taunt and the shot, whether a make or a miss, the two boys’ laughter would become intertwined. They would nudge each other in the shoulder or get into friendly headlocks. They would push each other gently and sometimes walk to the next station with an arm draped on the new friend’s shoulder.

PARALLEL PLAY

 

There are still many mysteries to Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition defined by typically developing or accelerated language and cognitive abilities but profound difficulties in the social realm, and in connecting with and understanding others. Why is it three to four times more common in young boys than girls? Is it a disorder? Or should it be thought of as just another hue in the human spectrum?

There is no mystery to the heart of the condition, as revealed in the brilliant essay by music critic Tim Page, who has lived his life with Asperger’s. It is a condition defined by early single-minded preoccupations—in Page’s case, maps of towns in Massachusetts, obituaries, memorizing most of the 1961 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia, and the music of Scottish comedian Harry Lauder (he publicly declared his contempt for the Beatles in his school newspaper). It is manifest in an unusual social style—often defined by a monotone voice, a lack of eye contact, a revulsion to touch, and fearless social oddities (Page liked to wear rabbit’s feet in each buttonhole of his shirt). It is no wonder that Page found Emily Post’s Etiquette an epiphany, a step-by-step manual for entering into the social complexities of the human race.

At the same time, the disinterested disregard for others can yield prodigious talents. Hans Asperger, the Viennese pediatrician who helped chart the nature of the condition, observed, “For success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential.” For Page, it led to deep insights into music. After hearing Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians in 1976, he was catapulted into a five-year study of minimalism in contemporary music that led to his career as a music critic. He observed that Reich had achieved the musical equivalent of imposing a frame upon a moving river.