Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life

by Dacher Keltner

  Given the enormous costs of negotiating rank, many species have shifted to ritualized battles. Displays of strength are exchanged in symbolic, dramatized form, and rank is negotiated through signaling rather than costly physical engagement. Red deer stags establish their rank in the autumn rut with roaring. The male who can roar louder and faster is assumed to be larger and stronger, and enjoys the ensuing evolutionary benefits (and, one hopes, the pleasures) of large harems of females. Harem holders will roar for hours on end, into the wee hours of the morning. They often lose weight in the process, to best their peers—all of which is a much better alternative than direct combat, injury, and an increased probability of death.

  It is well known that many frogs and toads use the depth of their croaks to negotiate rank. Male frogs in one experiment were much less likely to attack another male when a deep croak was played by loudspeaker next to the pair. The deep vocalization, produced by large vocal cords, was assumed by both to be the signal of an exceptionally strong rival.

  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”):

  babblers, snaggle-teeth, crazy carrot heads, scabs, shit-a-beds, boors, sly cheats, lazy louts, fancy fellows, drunkards, braggarts, good-for-nothings, dunderheads, nut-shellers, beggars, sneak-thieves, mincing milksops, apers of their betters, idlers, half-wits, gapers, hovel-dwellers, poor fish, cacklers, conceited monkeys, teeth-clatterers, dung-drovers, shitten shepherds.

  Our participants resorted to their own earthy patois, generating nicknames like “turkey jerk,” “little impotent,” “human fly,” “anal duck,” “heffer fetcher,” and “another drunk.” Systematically contained in the teasing were admonitions about transgressions that could unsettle the fraternity. There were numerous references to excessive drinking, and roughly a quarter of the teases made reference, often a bit incongruous in the context of the story being told, to the target’s genitalia. One story directed at a low-status pledge called him “Taco John” and revealed to the audience how this pledge had gotten so wasted on eighteen shots of Bacardi that at a late-night feast at the fast-food spot, Taco John’s, he disappeared, and was found passed out in the bathroom, near a toilet, holding his genitals. The fraternity members were notifying each other about moral boundaries: Don’t get too drunk, and keep your genitals to yourself.

  More in-depth coding focused on the provocative aggression of the tease—easy to detect in terms of its aggressive and humiliating content—as well as the off-record markers that render the tease less biting. These include shifts in voice, funny facial expressions, laughter, and use of metaphor and exaggeration. After the months it took to code these thirty-to forty-second bursts of teasing, we found a clear
story about status and teasing, represented in the figure below. High-status actives teased everyone, in particular low-status pledges, in aggressive, provocative fashion, putting them in their place. Low-status pledges flattered their new high-status brothers, recognizing the elevated rank of the actives. With sharp teeth, however, they went after the other low-status pledges, no doubt jousting for an edge. We also found that more popular pledges, some of whom had great charisma and charm, and were clearly and quickly on the rise, were teased in more flattering fashion. Within a couple of weeks of the group’s formation at the start of the academic year, thirty-second teases were clearly demarcating rank.

  If one were to study transcripts of the spoken words of these teasing battles, one would have expected affront, aggression, and perhaps a thrown punch or two. Instead, these groups of four fraternity members laughed in hysterical unison. They patted each other on the back and pushed each other playfully. They growled and pointed in mock aggression. In the briefest of instances they looked into each other’s eyes. In fact, in my twenty years of science, which has involved thousands of participants, this study produced two anomalies. I had members of the fraternity who had not been in the study call me on my office phone to ask whether they too could be in the study. And I had a couple of participants ask if they could be in the study a second time (which prompted a rather dull lecture on my part about how science requires independent observations of single participants).

  Notwithstanding the degrading nicknames and humiliating tales of perverse sexuality and exposed genitals, fraternity members indicated that they thought more highly of the three guys they had just teased and been teased by than the other members of the fraternity. My coding of the laughter and embarrassment revealed how. The more a teaser and target fell into antiphonal or shared laughter, the more they liked each other. The more the target blushed and showed subtle signs of embarrassment (the gaze aversion, the face touch, the head movement down and away), which often ended in conciliatory eye contact between teaser and target, the more the teaser liked the target. Teasing, when done well, provides a platform for negotiating conflict-laden relationships—in this case, positions of rank in a hierarchy—in playful, friendly fashion. And on that platform of playful provocation, teasing evokes brief bursts of emotion—shared laughter, the urge to reconcile at another’s embarrassment—that move individuals toward greater jen.

  MERRY WAR

  A few years ago I was vacationing with my family on a cool, whitesand beach near Monterey, California. While we were building sand piles, bodysurfing small waves, and looking for sand crabs in the shallows of the frothy surf, a group of Mexican-American teenagers descended upon our peaceful place in the sun. Clad in the blue trousers and pressed white shirts of their Catholic school, they approached the beach under the watch of their teacher in gender-segregated, orderly, single-file lines. Once situated, with the sound of the surf and away from their teacher, who was enjoying a well-deserved moment of repose, they broke into a bedlam of teenage teasing.

  The five boys and six girls were like molecules bound together by the attractive forces of teasing. There was a continuous stream of pinching, head rubbing, poking, squeezing, name calling, howling, and laughing. As rhythmic as the sound of the ocean, two boys would grab a girl, hold her by her arms and legs, and dangle her over the ebb and flow of the waves. Three demure girls sneaked up on a boy and tried to tug his low-hanging pants down. He forcefully countered with fistfuls of sand. Water was dripped on necks. Sand was pressed into others’ pants. Seaweed dangled in front of faces. Dog piles occasionally broke out. In a surprise attack one girl managed to nearly drop a dead crab down a boy’s pants. When their teacher called them back to the bus, they regained their composure and left in two lines, one of boys, the other of girls.

  As they departed, my daughter Serafina, then 5, asked me: “Why did that girl put the crab in the boy’s pants?”

  “Because she likes him,” I responded.

  This left Serafina dumbfounded. So I mumbled something unintelligible about how we actually tease people we like, Grice’s maxims, and the playful realm of off-record language, and told her that we often mean the opposite of what we say or do. What Serafina took from viewing this teenage drama, I hope, is wisdom about the invaluable place teasing has in intimate relations.

  There is no relation more vital to the survival of our species than the intimate bond. There is no relationship more fraught with conflict or more fragile. Our ultravulnerable, big-brained offspring require more than one caregiver to survive, thus binding us into long-term caretaking relations, which have no parallel in our close primate relatives. And from their moment of inception to their end, intimate relations roil with conflict, sacrifice, and matters to negotiate. In early stages of intimacy, sexual strategies—interests in short-term exchange or long-term devotion—require navigation. As children, housework, and mortgages arrive, partners can feel like beleaguered managers of a halfway house, moving from one crisis to the next. Intimate life is a “merry war,” as noted by Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing.

  So we turn to teasing to solve many problems of intimate life. We tease to flirt, to discover others’ affections and sexual interests. Monica Moore surreptitiously observed teenagers at a mall, and found their moblike meanderings to be punctuated by bursts of teasing. Young boys and girls would routinely veer into each other’s orbits to pinch, tickle, poke, and squeeze, creating, of course, opportunities for physical contact and brief mutual gaze—so highly regulated during the self-conscious teenage years. For young teens, teasing is a drama in which telltale signs of attraction—the blush, the lip pucker, the mellifluous, “voiced” laugh, the gaze that lasts beyond the .45-second eye contact that defines more formal social exchange—are sought with hormonally charge voracity amid the razor-sharp surveillance of peers. Teasing is an entrance into a playful world in which potential suitors can test and provoke one another. Were contemporary teens more restricted in their physical contact, they would resort to the war of words that marks the first encounter of Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, sure signs that they are to fall in love:

  BEATRICE

  I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick. Nobody marks you.

  BENEDICK

  What, my dear Lady Disdain! Are you yet living?

  BEATRICE

  Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come in her presence.

  BENEDICK

  Then is courtesy a turncoat. But it is certain I am lov’d of all ladies, only you excepted; and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart, for truly I love none.

  BEATRICE

  A dear happiness to women! They would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God and my cold blood, I am of your humor for that. I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.

  BENEDICK

  God keep your ladyship still in that mind! So some gentleman or other shall scape a predestinate scratch’d face.

  BEATRICE

  Scratching could not make it worse, an ’twere such a face as yours were.

  BENEDICK

  Well, you are a rare parrot-teacher.

  BEATRICE

  A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours.

  BENEDICK

  I would my horse had the speed of your tongue, and so good a continuer. But keep your way, a God’s name; I have done.

  BEATRICE

  You always end with a jade’s trick, I know you of old.

  With age, as sexual partners move in with one another, sharing the conduct of everyday life, partners develop their own personal idiom, including provocative nicknames and teasing insults. Partners develop teasing insults about each other’s sexual proclivities, their bodily functions, their sleep habits, their manner of eating, the anachronistic hairstyle they dogmatically prefer—all threats to connubial
bliss. These teasing insults mark partners’ quirks and foibles as deviant, and problematic if carried to extremes, but endearing foibles nonetheless, uniquely appreciated by the partner. Studies of married partners find that partners with a richer vocabulary of teasing insults are happier, and enjoy a better long-term prognosis.

  The teasing of romantic partners—nicknames, ritualized insults—not only signals their unique intimacy together. It also provides a realm of pretense in which the two can playfully negotiate their conflicts. To explore this possibility, I had couples who had been together for several years tease each other with the nickname task. Roughly a quarter of the nicknames they generated involved universal metaphors of love—references to their partner as pieces of food (apple dumpling) or small animals. Once again, a nod to the benefits of teasing in the merry war of intimacy: The more satisfied couples were more adroit at teasing; they were more likely to use off-record markers in their fifteen seconds of teasing—exaggerations, repetitions, mimicry, playful intonations, shifts in pitch, tongue protrusions, contorted facial expressions. They had developed a nonliteral, off-record dimension to their intimate life, one which they could readily transport to, to enjoy the levity, antiphonal laughter, and lightness of the realm of pretense. The playfulness of their fifteen-second teasing, we additionally found, predicted how happy the couples were six months later.