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