In another study we examined the precise instances in which partners criticized each other. We identified specific moments as they haggled over a serious conflict in their relationships—money issues, future commitment, infidelities, questions about how they spend time together. Much of the time partners delivered the criticism in well-reasoned, on-record, literal prose that would satisfy any juror or local rhetorician. Other times partners teased to criticize—with exaggerated claims, a ritualized insult, a playful imitation of the other, a nickname, mock anger or frustration. They delivered the same content—some provocative criticism, for example, about the partner’s bevy of ne’er-do-well friends or tendency to spend too much money—but did so in nonliteral fashion, employing off-record markers to indicate a nonserious side to what they were saying. Couples who playfully teased, as opposed to resorting to direct, cogent, but ultimately hackle-raising criticism, felt more connected after the conflict, and trusted their partners more. The playful dramatizing of conflict is an antidote to toxic criticism that can dissolve an intimate bond. Teasing is a battle plan for the merry war.
THE PLAYGROUND PARADOX
On April 20—the birthday of Adolf Hitler—1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, armed with semiautomatic weapons and a hit list, and proceeded to kill twelve of their fellow students, a teacher, and then themselves. In a burst of soul searching, Americans raised muted questions about guns, games, and drugs. Harris and Klebold had made over ninety-nine bombing devices, and had an astonishing collection of firearms, hidden from adults. They were avid players of Doom, one of many violent videogames known now, thanks to research by Craig Anderson and Brad Bushman, to short-circuit compassionate tendencies and to amplify aggression. After going on Zoloft and then Luvox for bouts of depression, Harris became increasingly prone to homicidal and suicidal thoughts.
In the immediate aftermath of the Columbine shootings, I received a call from a counselor who had been working with children there. Harris and Klebold had been bullied by the jocks at Columbine High. This bullying, some suggested, had been condoned by administrators at the school—a fact that led to many zero-tolerance policies toward bullying in schools. Her deep concern, in reading my research, was that I was condoning bullying by saying that teasing is good.
The simple answer to her query is that the heart of bullying has nothing to do with teasing. What bullies largely do is act violently—they torment, hit, pin down, steal, and vandalize. This has little to do with teasing.
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.
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 tone
s, 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.
At childhood birthday parties Page felt deeper empathy for the piñata than his sugar-juiced peers. In his teens, when in the close confines of interested young girls, he would chatter on without making eye contact. Later he confessed to making love like the Tin Man. About his understanding of others, Page writes: “I am left with the melancholy sensation that my life has been spent in a perpetual state of parallel play, alongside, but distinctly apart from, the rest of humanity.”
What proves to be difficult for Asperger’s children are the tools of social connection, all those contributors to the numerator of the jen ratio—eye contact, gentle touch, the understanding of others’ minds, embarrassment or love, imaginative play with others, greeting smiles with smiles, antiphonal laughter. And teasing, as revealed in a study I conducted with my friend and colleague Lisa Capps. If teasing is a dramatic performance, one that requires nonliteral language, where affections, conflicts, commitments, and identities are playfully negotiated, this should be particularly difficult for Asperger’s children. They have difficulties in imaginative play, pretense, taking others’ perspectives, and the elements of the tease, in particular nonliteral communication.
In our study we visited the homes of Asperger’s children and their mothers, as well as the homes of comparison children and their mothers. We asked the children to recount experiences of teasing. We then had them tease each other with the nickname paradigm. Our children were 10.8 years old, on average—the very age that children’s capacities for multiple representations and irony come on line and teasing transforms into a pleasurable social drama. Our comparison children described experiences of teasing that had many positive flavors, in which they navigated the connections and moral notions of preteen life. The Asperger’s children, in contrast, recounted experiences that were largely negative, and made little reference to connection and community. When we coded the brief teasing exchanges between parents and child, we found out why. Asperger’s children were just as hostile in their teasing of their mothers as comparison children, but they showed none of the nonliteral gems of an artful tease—exaggeration, repetition, prosodic shifts, funny facial expressions, imitations, iconic gestures, metaphor. These difficulties with the tease, we also found, could be attributed to the child’s difficulties with taking others’ perspectives.
In summing up his life with Asperger’s, Page reflects:
I cannot pretend that Asperger’s has not made much of my existence miserable and isolated (how will I get to sleep tonight?). I hope that young Aspies, informed by recent literature on the subject, will find the world somewhat less challenging than I have.
As one of our young Asperger’s children said: “There are some things I don’t know so much about…. Teasing is one of them.” Absent teasing, the Asperger’s child misses out on a layer of social life, of dramatic performances where affections are realized, roles are defined, conflicts are hashed out, all in the lighthearted rhetoric of nonliteral language. They miss out on what teasing gives us: shared laughter, playful touch, ritualized reconciliation, the perspective of others—a life beyond parallel play.
9
Touch
FOR THE PAST FIFTEEN YEARS His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL) has been engaging scientists and Tibetan Buddhists in dialogues about the interface between the science of the human nervous system and the 2500-year-old tenets of Tibetan Buddhism. The intention is to uncover commonalities and differences in how these two ways of knowing arrive at claims about the nature of mind, emotion, and happiness.
I have participated in two Buddhism-Science panels, one at MIT and the other through the Dalai Lama Peace Center in Vancouver Canada. Each event evoked out-of-body feelings of the unreality of a wedding day. There was the swirl of the 200 photographers who track HHDL’s every bow, smile, laugh, attentive head nod, finger pointing rhetorical flourish, cough, and sneeze. At MIT, bomb-sniffing dogs circled the space-age auditorium, sniffing under chairs and behind posters protesting for a free Tibetan state. Stone-faced secret service agents, mumbling into collar microphones, stood in dark suits positioned in perfectly proportioned geometric arrangements to protect the space that HHDL moved through. Outside the MIT auditorium at 6 AM hundreds of meditators, peacefully arrayed in rows of upright torsos and braided hair, sat in contemplative anticipation, occasionally awakened by the strike of gongs. The dozens of volunteers who made these events possible, long time practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism from the west, uniformly spoke of being touched by HHDL. Literally touched. One recalled clasping his hands years ago in New York. Another recalled a brush during a bow in Daram Sala India, where HHDL resides. Still another recalled his hand on a shoulder at a reception following a talk. They could remember the precise instant of the touch, the warm feeling that rippled through their bodies, and the lasting change this contact introduced into their lives. Often the act of recalling the touch produced bright eyes, a flush, a head tilt, tearing, and an intimate but remote look in the eyes.
On the stage in Vancouver before our dialogue, HHDL entered stage left and proceeded to greet the four panelists with his customary bow and clasped hands. The sighs, tears, appreciative head nods, goose bumps, and embraces of the 2,500 people in the audience produced a crackling ether that filled the art deco auditorium. I was the last panelist for HHDL to approach. From eighteen inches away I came into cont
act with HHDL. Partially stooped in a bow, he made eye contact with me and clasped my hands. His eyebrows were raised. His eyes gleamed. His modest smile was poised near a laugh. Emerging out of the bow and clasped hands, he embraced my shoulders and shook them slightly with warm hands.
As he turned to the audience, I had a Darwinian spiritual experience. Goose bumps spread across my back like wind on water, starting at the base of my spine and rolling up to my scalp. A flush of humility moved up my face from my cheeks to my forehead and dissipated near the crown of my head. Tears welled up, along with a smile. I recalled a saying of HHDL’s:
At the most fundamental level our nature is compassionate, and that cooperation, not conflict, lies at the heart of the basic principles that govern our human existence.
For several weeks after I lived in a new realm. My suitcase was missing at the carousel following the plane flight home—not a problem, I didn’t need those clothes anyway. Squabbles between my two daughters about the ownership of a Polly Pocket or about whose back-bending walkover best matched the platonic ideal—no bristling reaction on my part, just an inclination to step into the fray and to lay out a softer discourse and sense of common ground. The frustrated person behind me in the line in the bank, groaning in exasperation—no reciprocal frustration, no self-righteous sense of how to comport oneself in more dignified fashion in public; instead, an appreciation of what deeper causes might have produced such apparent malaise. The people I saw, the undergrads in my classroom, parents at my daughters’ school, preschool teachers walking little groups of three-year-olds in hand-holding chains around the streets of Berkeley, those parallel parking their cars, recyclers picking up cans and bottles, the homeless shaking their heads and cursing the skies, people in business suits reading the morning paper waiting for a carpool ride, all seemed guided by remarkably good intentions. My jen ratio was approaching infinity.
Born to Be Good_The Science of a Meaningful Life Page 18