December 28, 2019 • 54 mins
We all know teasing when we see it or experience it, but what role does it play in human interactions? Join Robert and Joe in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind as they explore hurtful, playful and educative teasing. (Originally published Sept. 11, 2018)
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault for an older episode. Uh.
This one originally aired September eleventh, two thousand eighteen, and
it's an episode we did about teasing. Yeah, this one,
this one was really fun, you know, getting into like
what teasing means, both when you know children are doing
(00:26):
it or if a parent is doing it like or
adults doing it to each other. Like what is this
thing we call teasing? And how does it factor into
the complexities of human communication and our social structures. Let's
jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind
from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey you, welcome to
(00:52):
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert, I've got a question
for you. You ever find yourself in that situation where
you're hanging out with people, it's all good fun, everybody's
there's banter going on. One person is teasing another person
over something kind of funny, some funny foible of their personality,
and there's that moment, there's that awful little moment where
(01:16):
there's kind of a pause after somebody says some some
teasing joke and then you realize like, oh no, suddenly
it has gotten serious. Oh yes, I mean it's especially
if it it's a multi person group and and there's
a bit of piling on occurring. They'll be there, I've
seen this, this happened, where they'll they'll be a breaking
(01:37):
point where the person has had enough and and and
you realize, oh, no, lines have been crossed and now
this person is gonna leave and we're gonna have to
resolve this uh via emails later. Uh yeah, And it's
as ter it's a terrible feeling because things have spiraled
out of control. Something that was playful and um and
just part of hanging out has now become divisive. Male
(02:00):
the best place to work out tents, social disputes, Well
sometimes sometimes it depends, and I mean, I guess it
depends on what role one had in the in the breakdown.
I've been fortunate enough to to not be like at
the epicenter of the of the breakdown generally, so um
email tends to suffice for me. You know, you never
(02:21):
have to worry that when you type a smiley emoji
that will look like a fake smile. When you actually
smile at somebody, you always gotta worry like does this
look real? Is my face moving? Right? So you just
have to use the authentic smiling emoji, not the unauthentic one.
You know, it's all on the micro expressions of the emoji.
What's the inauthentic one that's like colon and clothes brackets.
(02:41):
Oh no, I'm talking about the ones that actually, like
the little yellow face with a smile, like you'll know
it when you see it. Okay, but is everyone can
realize that at this point we're talking about teasing today
on the show, and teasing is weird territory to try
and figure out deceptively, so really um for many of
us looking back on our child hoods, it's it makes
up some of our worst memories of social interaction. And
(03:05):
as as a parent, I have a lot of apprehension
about it, you know, regarding my own child, the inevitable
struggles that he's gonna gonna face. And at the same time,
there's this weird cult of the tease that is often
difficult to understand. We see teasing in our media and
it's sometimes presented as in a fun comical light. We
also see adults for whom teasing is a standard part
(03:26):
of their interactions, not fighting with each other, but but
just picking in various ways that it's it seems like
they're just terms of endearments, joking, benign criticism. Yeah, and
it and uh, it's often a case where I look
at it and I realized, well, this is clearly part
of their social dynamic. It wouldn't necessarily work in my
social dynamic, but I guess it's okay. Uh. We see
(03:49):
it factor into courtship as well, which also has a
way of of seeming weird and sour at times of
an outside perspective. Well, I mean, there's there's two very
different ways it can take place. There's a kind you
can see, a kind of friendly sweet teasing that takes
place between people in the courtship relationship. And then there's
like the pickup artist version of it, where somebody's clearly
(04:10):
like making a power play, right. And then likewise, we
also see this this space, this sort of ambiguous space
where playful teasing gives over to what is clearly something
based in hate and abuse name calling, uh, that occurs
among children and even among adults. Obviously, even at the
highest levels of government, you see name calling used in
(04:33):
a in a hurtful fashion. So if you start, if
you start picking out, and I imagine a lot of
your doing this as well, thinking of all the varying
levels of teasing that are going on in your immediate
environment and um in politics and the media, etcetera. On
the street as you're driving your car and listen to
this podcast. You know, it's enough to make you wonder
if if we're just nothing more than just cruel apes
(04:56):
jockeying for social position. Uh, And it's any wonder we
managed to emerge from these social interactions with self esteem
and respect for our fellow humans. But part of the
issue here is that while all forms of teasing share
common features, there are at least three distinctive forms of
teasing that are often signal, that are often singled out
(05:17):
and definitely deserve mention here. Okay, well what would those
forms be? All right? Well, the first is pretty obvious,
and that is that is the hurtful teasing. And I
think it's one of those things where we all we
all know it when we see it right or hear it.
This is obviously the domain of bullying and harassment, and
yet at the same time it's the sort of teasing
you might see in a celebrity roast, or some of
(05:40):
you are more viciously charged humor or political humor. I
guess you could also say it's maybe the domain of
the jesture, the fool and the clown. Uh and important.
These are important roles throughout human history. Oh yeah, well,
I mean I might argue that the fool in the
Shakespearean sense requires its own category here, because the fool
has a lot of power and freedom, and that's important
(06:01):
power and freedom. Like they're the only member of the
lower classes who can point out the flaws of the
monarchs and the upper classes and get away with it.
There's something about the ridiculousness of the fool that allows
a critique of power that might result in a beheading
if you made the same critique in a serious tone.
And likewise, a king who beheads a jester every week
(06:25):
is a terrible king. They look weak. Yeah, it makes
the king look foolish if the king overreacts to a
to a comical critique, right, I think you're pointing Joffrey
from Game of Thrones, is this type of ruler where
you realize, oh, he's terrible, he's totally incompetent. Look how
thin skinny is against uh, the humorous criticism of the
(06:49):
court fool. Well, it codes so easily for us. I mean,
one of the clearest signs of a toxic personality is
somebody who's unable to accept criticism and even benign criticism,
or to be the butt of a joke, you know,
somebody who cannot tolerate that, right, especially because of the
positive role that teasing plays in our culture. I mean,
(07:10):
there's so much teasing that is not hurtful, hateful. I
mean it is a constant feature of conversation between friends,
between couples, between family members, between educators and the people
they educate. Teasing, you know, there's like a sweet, benign
form of teasing that's absolutely essential to these relationships. You know.
(07:31):
I do have to add one more thing about the
gesture first, though, Okay, And there is there is this
this curious aspect of the dynamic you see with kind
of a classic gesture situation, but also in modern political humor,
there are two extremes that are both equally well maybe
not equally, but they're both cringe worthy, certainly when the king,
(07:53):
the rule, or the politician, whoever the celebrity is too
thin skin to let humorous bashing go where they have
to call out, say, you know an episode of Saturday
Night Live, right, if you made a joke about me,
how dare you? Right? Yeah, that is is cringeworthy and awful.
But on the same hand, and this is something that
I believe It was pointed out on an episode of
(08:13):
Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist history podcast, there's also this danger in
what happens when the king says, yeah, this gesture guys great,
I'm going to hang out with him and do a
skit with him, or yeah, that's Saturday Night Life skit
is funny. I'm gonna appear on that Saturday Night Life
skit with the person doing an impression of me. There
can be uh, too much protection of one's dignity is
(08:36):
a bad sign, but too much surrender of one's dignity
also looks kind of bad. Like, you gotta find the
middle ground. You want the ruler that that ultimately has
very little to do with the gesture and doesn't politely
laughs perhaps but leaves it at that. I know exactly
what you're talking about, Like when presidential candidates go on SNL,
that's always like, I don't know, it's just always terrible. Yeah.
(08:59):
But one of the points that Malcolm Gladwell made in
his shows that it takes the punch out of the
political humor, like you managed in a way, it's like
it's a genius move I guess for the politician, because
you have you have killed the humorous skit. You have
you have killed the power of the humor in a
way that you could never do by attacking it. Well, yeah,
I guess it doesn't make you look great, but it
(09:20):
also is a type of defense mechanism. It undercuts any
truly biting criticism that's hidden there in the in the
comedy if you go on stage with the comedian. Yes,
but before we were talking about the Jester, we were
we were about to get into playful teasing, you know,
the sweet form of teasing, right, And obviously there's a
(09:41):
line between hurtful and and u and playful teasing. Good
luck finding, especially with people you're maybe not that familiar with.
But yeah, especially in close relationships, you tend to see
these you know, you see in jokes and you see
established safe zones for playful teasing. Uh. For instance, if
my wife teases me about some nerdy hobby of mine, Uh,
(10:04):
it's it's really more of a form, more of a
term of endearment. Or if she teases me about liking
robot music, like like really robotic sounding electronic music, and
uh and teasing me about how awful it sounds. Uh,
like like this is that this feels good when we're
doing it. I don't feel hurt or defensive about you know,
my my love of dungeons and dragons, or or or
(10:28):
my miniatures painting miniatures, or yeah, or my affinity for
the music of autech or that sort of thing. Yeah.
I think almost all good romantic relationships include an element
of teasing. I don't you know. I don't want to
be overly general. So maybe some people people make it
work in all kinds of ways, but I rarely see
what seems like a happy couple that doesn't tease one another, right,
(10:50):
I mean, it seems like you do. And this is
something we're gonna return to throughout this episode. This idea
that that teasing it is is an opportunity for bond
for me and the establishment and the maintaining of bonds.
And but obviously you need a safe place for the
teasing just you know that all of us, I think
we're going to have unless we are some sort of
(11:12):
like inhuman politician type, you know, we're going to have
those areas that we are cool being teased about in
areas that we're less comfortable being teased about. You know,
thinking about several of the areas that that teasing functions
in our our social interactions, one of which is sort
of reminding people of hierarchies or establishing hierarchies. That it
(11:33):
does something of enforcing a pecking order. Number two is
maybe like establishing a criticism of somebody's behavior, and number
three is allowing bonding. Put these three things together, and
it seems like a key place where teasing should come
into play is education, right, because that's a place where
you need a hierarchy between teacher and student. You want
(11:54):
to teach lessons and you also want to have a
good relationship. That's right. So this brings us to this
third area of teasing, educative teasing, and this pops up
in areas that you wouldn't quite expect it as as
we'll discuss a little later. One example is that is
that of a frat boys giving each other's nicknames based on,
you know, various bone headed things they've done. Uh and
(12:16):
and this can be viewed as a way of of educating,
of laying down various um moral rules or or social expectations.
Right d a teasing, you might get nicknamed like, I
don't know, toilet head because you fell asleep with your
head in the toilet, right, And the idea is, don't
do that, don't drink so much that you sleep in
the toilet. But then again, one of the things I
(12:39):
noticed about that kind of teasing is that toilet head
might originally be applied as a sort of like moral injunction,
but the toilet head make may well come to identify
with the nickname and say, that's right, that's who I am.
I am toilet head forevermore, and I will embrace it. Yeah. Now,
some anthropology just point to specific traditions of educated teasing
(13:03):
between parents and children in various Indigenous American um cultures,
and the idea here is that it's a form of
teasing that can work better to impart knowledge of social
rules and emotionally instilled ideas. However, we We didn't really
focus on any of that for this research, but I
just want to let everyone know that that that is
an area of study now. As far as these three
(13:25):
terms for types of teasing go, I I feel like
there's some difficulty in how we use terms here because
I admit that I would typically reserve the word teasing
for the more benign or playful forms, like what we
were calling hurtful teasing, the kind that's actually cruel and
mean spirited. I would not usually call teasing. I'd probably
(13:46):
call it bullying or harassment or something. Um though. It's
what What this highlights is that the line between playful
teasing and hurtful bullying is not always clear. It's not
always clear to the person doing it, It's always not
always clear to the person receiving it. What sometimes ment
is benign or playful by the teaser can feel like
(14:07):
bullying to the tea Z and sometimes more benign or
playful forms of teasing. I bet you've been there for this.
I think we sort of talked about it at the beginning.
It starts off as a friendly and playful session of
ribbing that somehow catches this terrible momentum. I don't know
what causes it, but that momentum it edges into harder
and meaner stuff as it escalates, and it's this enormously
(14:31):
painful and uncomfortable thing to witness. And looking back, I
can remember instances of this in my life where I
watch something like this happened to somebody else, and in retrospect,
like I wish I'd found a way to step in
in the moment and stop it. But it's so much
easier to to to feel that kind of policing authority
in retrospect in the moment, to step in like that
(14:54):
into clear teasing to have gone too far requires you
to take this major risk. It feels like you're violating
a taboo. You're making it weird. You know you know
about making it weird right um, And in the moment
you're never really sure if you've like misread some kind
of unspoken set of cues. Maybe everything's actually okay, and
you're the one who's making people feel bad by getting
(15:16):
serious from out of nowhere. It can be a really
difficult and complicated UH dance to to navigate. All right,
on that note, we're gonna take a quick break and
when we come back, we're gonna we're gonna really get
into the question of teasing and what purpose it truly serves. Alright,
we're back. So one of the big names that comes
(15:36):
up in teasing research is that of psychiatry and psychology
researcher Dr Keltner, who has written on this, researched on this,
and one of the big pieces that is often circulated
is a two thousand and eight New York Times piece
titled in Defense of Teasing. Uh, And he also directs
the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, So this is like right
(15:59):
in his uh, his area of focus. Yeah. Kiltner makes
an interesting point, which is that a lot of our
social conventions in the modern age, I think, are centered
around trying to make social interactions more safe, which in
a way is a good thing. Right. We we all
know how destructive and terrible bullying can be. We've all
(16:20):
seen the kind of teasing in a relationship and you know, uh,
somebody's somebody's got a new boyfriend and he's teasing her,
but he's like going a little hard. It doesn't quite
seem so sweet. And when you think about stuff like that,
it can be very easy to start to start to
view teasing is this really negative thing. It's this this cruel,
(16:42):
malicious force that permeates our culture and and make you
want to do things to eliminate it. Right, Well, how
can we get people to not act like this? But
I feel like teasing is a situation where you really
don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Well you don't, but you you want to protect the bank.
That's the thing. I mean throughout this episode, I kept
(17:03):
coming I keep coming back to UM, my own son,
and I just want to protect him so much from
these things. At the same time, I realized I can't
protect him there from everything. I can't just chadow him
through school and you know, feed him excellent, you know comebacks. Uh,
anytime anybody is is trying to tease him, he's going
to be teased. It's it's inevitable, and he it's probably
(17:26):
inevitable to that to engage in teasing Um. But at
the same time, it is hard for me to just
really get behind everything Kelton is saying about just the
importance of teasing, Like I still my impulse to protect
is too strong. Well, I mean, I think the point
he would be making is the good kind of teasing
(17:49):
is not actually hurtful. It's not actually something that needs
to be protected. And he's not advocating that that bullying
should be permitted. It's very clear about that. But but
but he does, let's make this strong, strong case that
that teasing is an essential part of our social interactions.
And in fact, he points out that the teasing is
pervasive in the animal world. Right now, we generally think
(18:11):
of teasing as uh, well, you know, as a verbal phenomenon, right,
and I guess you do have to think of of
human teasing as as a lot of things with humans
happens to be you think of it as a linguistic
and cultural complication of an impulse that may also be
found within uh languageless animals. And so, for instance, Keltner says, quote,
(18:35):
the centrality of teasing in our social evolution is suggested
by just how pervasive teasing is in the animal world.
Younger monkeys pull the tales of older monkeys. African hunting
dogs jump all over one another, much like pad slapping
joking football players moments before kickoff. In every corner of
the world, human adults play peekaboo games to stir a
(18:57):
sulking child. Children as early as age one and mimic
nearby adults and teenagers prod one another to gauge romantic interest.
In rejecting teasing, we may be losing something vital and
necessary to our identity as the most playful of species.
I mean, I think I'm pretty on board with his
message there. It's the the difficulty comes in our uncertainty
(19:20):
about recognizing the line between benign teasing and hurtful teasing.
And and I think it's because there's that ambiguity, because
there's always the danger that you you're not necessarily going
to be able to recognize immediately the difference between one
or the other. It's exactly the same problem I was
mentioning a minute ago, where you like, think back on
(19:40):
a time you saw somebody getting teased and went over
the line, but you didn't stop it. Um, it's because
of that ambiguity, like you didn't know if you should
step in or not. And that ambiguity makes us uncomfortable
because we know teasing this over the line is wrong,
but you can't always see the line in the moment.
It would be interesting to hear from from Edrick writers
out there who are listening to the show on this
(20:02):
because it does make one think that the message should
not be hey, kids don't tease one another. It should
maybe be more here areas where it is not cool
to tease. You like, it's not cool to tease someone
about their physical appearance or the characters or stereotypes, etcetera. Um,
but various behavioral teasing. I don't know how, I mean,
(20:23):
how do you end up teaching such nuance? Maybe you
to a certain extent, you can't. It has to generate
via the social interactions. Here's something I would say, Um, well,
with a with a big exception for we can talk
about the jester in a second. With a big exception
for the jester. Maybe one thing is that you shouldn't
tease somebody unless you like them and they know you
(20:44):
like them. That's true because otherwise, if the if the
existing social dynamic is is anything different than you are
perhaps not engaging in pure teasing. No, I mean, then
it becomes bullying. When you tease somebody you don't even
like her respect obviously you're you're going to be tempted
to edge over into some form of cruelty. Now, speaking
(21:04):
of cruelty, we have to think a kaind of of kings,
and of course the jester. Keltner points out that that
in the tradition of the court jester, you could say
teasing is quote, a playful, provocative mode of commentary. Yeah,
I think that's right. I mean, as Touchstone said and
Shakespeare's as you like it quote, the fool don't think
he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to
(21:27):
be a fool. You know, that's hundreds of years before
all the modern research on illusory confidence and dunning Krueger
and all that. I think this reveals that a key
social good of even harder edge teasing is that when
it's properly applied, it can be kind of a leveling tool,
Like it knocks down the wicker men of big egos
and and pops the balloons of unearned self confidence that
(21:49):
we see so often in our highest levels of leadership.
But of course, just as often it's applied the other way,
and in a very bad, destructive way. It gets applied
from the top down by the inflated ego against the
less empowered. I guess it's sort of like a hierarchy
enforcement mechanism. But the bottom up form, the jester driven form.
(22:09):
I think that's a that leveling instinct is a useful
social good and a form of freedom. Teasing is an
arena that allows us to experiment with language, with personality
and relationships. It's sort of an open ended game that
we can use to manage relationships and learn about each other. Now,
Calton and Keltner also turns to the work of linguistic
anthropologist Penelope Brown and cognitive anthropologist Stephen Levinson, who I
(22:35):
believe we've we've touched on both of their work before
on the podcast, but their work that he's referencing here
is more specifically aligned with the study of politeness. But
of interest here is the their focus on two forms
of communication, like basically breaking down communication into two forms.
So we're talking mostly about linguistic communication here, but on
(22:58):
the on record communication and off record communication. Okay, so
tell me the difference. Okay. So on record communication is
just literal direct speech. You take it literally. It's meant
meant to be taken literally. It's clear, and it's direct.
This is the kind of speech you would want from
your doctor or your lawyer or whatever. Right if you
if someone were to come up to you on the
(23:20):
street and uh and say, hey, you've got something on
your face? Um, Like that's clear, Like, hey, I think
there's some food on your face. You need you might
want to get that off Like they're they're not playing around.
They're just letting you know. It might be socially awkward,
but they are being direct in their communication. They're they're
not they're not joking, they're not being vague about it.
Off the record is veiled meeting metaphor alternative meaning. So
(23:45):
this is if someone were to come up on your
street and be like, hey, um, you got a little
something right there. Hey, if you you know, if they
were kind of kind of beat around the bush a
little bit, you know, you might want to take a
look in a mirror. Bro right, Yeah, that kind of
thing where it can it's off the record, and it
can be in a way that is meant to, uh
to make the the the message softer, or it can
(24:07):
go the reverse, right, it can it can make it harder.
You could be straight up mocking somebody on the street
for the little bit of lunch they still have, you know,
caught in their beard. Yeah, it seems the key to
the off record communication is is some form of ambiguity.
And one reason is that off record communication is sometimes risky, right,
people want deniability if their message is not well received.
(24:30):
Off record communication is the kind of communication where you
can say I was just kidding. On record communication, you
cannot plausibly say I was just kidding. And you've all
been there when somebody delivered on record communication and then
tried to I was just kidding afterwards. It doesn't work there. No,
there's generally no room for for retreat, except to like
(24:52):
physically retreat. So the point here is that in modern
human interactions, you don't always want to be direct on record.
Your communication doesn't always work for the same reasons that
it's not practical to always be truthful. White lies are
sometimes required or lies of emission. Uh, And so it's
it's sometimes necessary to communicate via off record communication to
(25:14):
say something and signal some other meaning, as annoying as
it can be at times. Obviously, we can all think
too situations where someone is not direct with us and
we wish they were direct. Oh yeah, I mean pretty
much everything we're talking about today that has a possible
good social good, you know, useful social role also can
(25:34):
be used for evil. I mean, every shifty, dishonest guy
you know uses a lot of off record communication and
always wants to be able to kind of weasel around
about what he said or what he meant, And so
Kellner argues that teasing is quote just such an act
of off record communication. Provocative commentary is shrouded in linguistic
acts called off record markers that suggests that commentary should
(25:59):
not be taken literally. So there's some sort of uh,
there's some sort of a wink there, right, But I
don't think this should cause us to sort uh communication
into like on record which is important, and off record
which is not important. Yeah, I mean, to your point,
it may be very important. It just might be socially delicate,
(26:19):
or you don't want to overstep the boundaries of your
established relationship with someone, and it may be essential to
to to to to to provide that wink to let
them know via you know, some sort of hand signal
or some alteration of your voice, or even the use
of rhyme or the mimicking of of of of some
other individual. It could be key to letting them know
(26:41):
I'm I'm using off record communication here, even even though
what I'm about to tell you is important. Well, yeah,
it's on record communication and off record communication. I would
say our respectively analogous to work and play, and play
is very important. Play is where we learn how to work. Ultimately,
it allows us to send messages in a in a
masked way or at least a kind of like a
(27:03):
lubricated way. Socially. Uh, this this may be a terrible example,
but but one that I have observed before. If you've
ever seen say an individual come out of a public
restroom and uh, and they say, who do not go
in there, or give you some sort of like joking warning,
that's a good one. Made. It tends it are it
Definitely I would say definitely works better than if they
(27:26):
were to look you square in the eyes and say
do not go in there. Though that's sort of like
five minutes, you know, Like then that's self deprecating. Yeah,
but it's also it's like awkward for both parties. But
if but if there's a joke there, like then it's
kind of like I'm kind of making fun of myself
and I'm also kind of making fun of fun of you.
But I'm also providing definite information that you should be
(27:47):
aware of regarding the the the aromatic state of this bathroom.
You're about to enter well to to incorporate teasing. I
can see how in that situation, teasing if somebody else
could actually be used to diffuse tension and make them
feel less bad. So like say you have to go
into a bathroom after somebody else and it smells bad,
and the other person knows that they've been in there,
(28:09):
and you know they're probably feeling embarrassed. You might be
able to say something that's like a tease of them
that indicates that they shouldn't actually be You know, you
can both laugh about it, which actually feels better than
just leaving it, leaving it unsaid and the person feeling
awkward and embarrassed. Though I'm not necessarily advocating making fun
of people's body smells, You've got to judge the situation
(28:30):
case by case, Keltner says. Quote in teasing, we become actors,
taking on playful identities to manage the inevitable conflicts of
living in social groups, which is as kind of crude
as this example we just laid out, is it. I mean,
that is an example of what we're talking about here.
I mean that is the inevitable conflict of living in
social groups, of going to restaurants and sharing restaurants, and
(28:51):
they also may allow us Keltner argues to engage in
the sort of social contest that may prove physical and
deadly in other species and ded we see plenty of
non human species that have evolved drama dramatized status contests
that don't involve combat. You know, uh, some sort of
like feathery display or or even a display of something
(29:12):
that might otherwise be used for for combat. But some mean,
some means of of engaging in social contest that doesn't
actually require two individuals to to fight until one backs off. Yeah,
I don't know if this is the kind I would
call teasing. I guess there might be elements you call
this gets up against when exactly I would actually use
(29:34):
the word again, But it's clearly Yeah, it's clearly part
of human culture that we use words and like insults
and humor and stuff like that to manage hierarchy navigation.
You're trying to take down the person above you, and
you can do it with a witty comment. But stuff
like that isn't always isn't always in this playful, sweet
(29:57):
realm of teasing. I mean that kind of stuff can
actually you pretty biting, right. But but the argument here
is that even in playful teasing, there is this potential
for uh for establishment of a pecking order. And that's
just another way that teasing and requires us to walk
a fine line right enhancing social connection while also establishing
(30:17):
a pecking order. Like it's sounds it's one of those
things that when you when you boil it down, um,
like imagine like setting out to do that consciously, like
all right, I've gotta I need to walk into the
office today. I needed I need to tear everybody down
just the appropriate amount so that we all feel a
little closer, but also that it's so that everybody thinks
that I'm superior or that I have the appropriate place
(30:40):
in the social dynamics of the office. You're describing management
strategy probably probably so no, no, no, that's not fair.
But yeah, I mean, I unfortunately, I think there are
some people who are that deliberate and that calculating about
the kind of stuff they say in a workplace. They're
not just talking to you about whatever they're thinking abou out.
(31:00):
They're making a comment to you in front of an
audience based on how it will benefit them. Now, we
mentioned frat frat brothers. Earlier, Keltner observed it among frat brothers.
In one study, teasing nicknames seemed to be quote more
morality plays based on misdeeds that they were encouraged to
move beyond. And among teens, teasing is a vital part
(31:20):
of a flirtation, a way of testing out others and
looking for genuine signs of interest. Yeah, and as I
mentioned earlier, I mean I feel like this can easily
go two ways. There is a very sweet kind of
teasing that takes that takes place in courtship, and then
there's definitely a gross form of it that's some kind
of social leverage trick, right, And then there's also something
(31:42):
problematic too about like if you established this rule that like, oh,
they're teasing you because they like you, like, then that
that and that may be the case, I mean that
it often is the case. It clearly is. But if
you but then it goes too far. If you established it,
then is this excuse for for problem amatic teasing, right,
like oh, that's just boys being boys or girls being girls?
(32:04):
Then you know, is it or are we using that
to cover up something that should be um policed in
some fashion? Well, often we are. This is yet another
case where it would be great if we could always
clearly see what the line is. And people's discomfort comes
in because sometimes it's not clear where the line is. Now.
On the subject of of teasing among committed partners, uh,
(32:25):
he points out that there is a language to it,
you know, they're all these little in jokes, and he
points to two studies that have shown that married couples
with a rich vocabulary of you know, various teasing nicknames
and ends of formulate insults, they tend to be happier
and more satisfied. And that's the sweet kind. Yeah. And
he also adds that it may help diffuse arguments over
(32:48):
really explosive issues, and that the terminology of the teasing
as well as often drawn from the same metaphors we
use for for love. They have to do, for instance,
with with food or small animals, right, like referring to
somebody as like a dum playing or a muffin or
something like that, or a or a bunny. Yes, though
(33:08):
apparently they did. It does depend on the language. Here.
I remember speaking with U, an individual of Thai descent,
and about how the use of pig or piggy or
you know, it's tie equivalent was a term of endearment,
especially for young children, whereas in English that the term
(33:30):
maybe has a has a bit more like spike to it,
if you're gonna call someone a pick or a piggy.
So a term of endearment in one language or culture
is not necessarily going to translate equally into another language.
Oh but I can actually see, like even in English,
a great novel where you establish a character's relationship, what
we're like, a wife calls her husband little piggy or something.
(33:51):
That seems that that's good, that's good character right there. Yeah. Now,
there's a ton of material out there on teasing, and
we can't possibly touch on all of it here today.
After all, it does seem to be a major aspect
of human social dynamics, and the legacy of childhood teasing
seems to be quite long. A lot of studies look
at childhood teasing and and the ramifications of it for adults. Yeah,
(34:14):
a lot of what I saw was just study after
study looking at whether child whether children perceived teasing as
harmful or not, and generally they did. Now, one of
one of the problems here is that it does come
down to that perception, how is the instance of teasing perceived?
And and and here we see this this this this
case where an instance of teasing might well be perceived
(34:36):
by one party as being playful and another party as
being harmful. I mean, going back to our initial example.
You know, in in group social dynamics, where someone goes
over the line, I mean most of the most of
the cases, and the person is not thinking I'm going
over the line, I'm going for it, I'm gonna go
for the hurt point. Here, well, sometimes they are, I mean,
(34:57):
there there are clearly different categories here. There is like
very often teasing is going to be perceived as good
natured by the person doing the teasing and as mean
and hurtful by the person receiving the teasing. But also
there there are two different versions of what's going on
in the perpetrator's mind. You've definitely seen cases where somebody
(35:18):
who genuinely meant no harm accidentally hurt somebody's feelings with teasing.
And then you see cases where people try to cover
their butts afterwards, like clearly they let some you know,
hurtful inclinations reveal itself too much. They were being mean,
but then afterwards they can be they can retreat. It's
off record communication, so they can be like, oh, I
(35:39):
was just kidding. I didn't mean any harm, don't you know,
don't get upset. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings,
but they kind of did, right. Yeah, I was looking
at a paper here, two thousand paper titled I Was
Only Kidding Victims and Perpetrators Perceptions of Teasing by Robin M. Kowowski,
and he points out that via seventy two person study,
I found that perspectives might refer lect of the views
(36:01):
of perpetrators and victims. The teaser remembers it more as
fun and focused on behavior, and the person being teased
remembers it more as hurtful and potentially focusing on their appearance. Yeah,
that's another thing. So one area in which teasing, I
think is just never acceptable. I mean you just never
want to go there is teasing about innate characteristics, not
(36:22):
not like about what somebody just did, but about what
they look like about their body, about fundamental personality issues.
It comes back to like the educative aspect of teasing,
like you can you if it's if it's if there's
something educative about it, it's like you should be doing
this differently, where you should have done this differently. But
I mean, you know, people for the for the vast
(36:44):
most part, cannot do anything about their their physical appearance,
you know. But but I've I'm sure you've seen this
where people tease somebody and it edges into teasing about
innate characteristics, and when they get called out, they try
to retreat to to like pretending they were just reacting
to behavior or something. No, no, no, no, I didn't
(37:06):
mean that, I meant this other thing. Yeah, Or they're
kind of like, oh, I'm sorry. I thought we were
just being mean, and so I was going to be
mean too. I didn't realize that we were being playful
or that we were critiquing things they had choices about. Now,
this this leads me to a question that I've I've
had in my mind for a little while here, and
that is, do certain people invite more playful and potentially
(37:28):
hurtful teasing than others, and if so, what are the factors?
So I've observed this in social situations in the past.
I'm sure a number of our listeners have as well.
In social dynamics, some individuals seem to attract more teasing
attention than others. And why is that? I think based
on some of what we've discussed here so far, we
could we could really point to various causes apparent social status,
(37:52):
attractiveness and desirability, but also difference outside or status, really
any area that would seem to invite, invite off the
record linguistic attention right. Well, because teasing has so many
different uses and meanings, there are a lot of different
ways that it can be attracted. I mean, one thing
that you can see is that obviously in hurtful teasing,
(38:14):
you know, the kind of cruel the thing I wouldn't
usually call teasing cruel, mean spirited bullying. I think the
people who attract that are people who look like easy targets,
people who are lower status in the community where they're
being teased, people who have less power to respond. I mean,
bullies pick on people they perceive to have a weakness. Now,
(38:36):
when it comes to the jester type of of teasing,
I think obviously they're the people who are going to
be attracting it, are going to be prominent, high status people,
and high status people also tend to invite the different
kind of teasing that's not even really teasing. But Keltner
talked about it in this article when he talked about
how frat brothers give each other nicknames. There's a kind
(38:57):
of teasing as praise that frat pledges show towards the
senior brothers of the fraternity. Uh. So it's structured like teasing,
but it's really more of a veiled compliment. Do you
know what I'm talking about. I'm sure you've seen this before,
where like people will be obsequious by pretending to rib
somebody above them, but in a way that's not actually
(39:20):
for anything bad they did, but really is more for
something good about them. Yeah. Yeah, you do see examples
of this, uh from time to time, almost kind of
getting into the idea of like hot shaming somebody, right,
like making fun of them for being attractive, making fun
of them for being successful or something that in that regard.
I mean, obviously in the fraternity context, a lot of
(39:43):
this is going to be like pretending to rib an
older frat brother for his you know, drinking ability, or
his sexual prowess or something. Uh. It's not really in
that context perceived as an insult, but they structure it
like one. It's a strange phenomenon. But but come back
to other people who seem to invite I think one
thing that is common to most forms of more barbed
(40:07):
teasing is that it's invited by people who do not
appear to have a very well developed sense of humor,
or people who appear to take themselves very seriously. I'm
sure you've observed this, right, Robert, Yes, I've definitely seen
this h in play, you know, in various work environments
over over the years, where the person who takes themselves
(40:29):
very seriously just it almost requires you to to take
them down a pay not if they can't laugh at themselves, right,
I mean, and then this is something that's not necessarily
going to take place like face to face obviously, Like
like if you have a say you have a boss
that is just really self involved, you you cannot help
(40:49):
but make fun of them with a co worker, you know,
regardless of if you if you ever do anything or
say anything that you know that that that individual is
ever gonna hear, you still have to at least joke
about them, uh with your other coworkers. Right, And as
Keltner points out, the dynamics of teasing tend to change
dramatically around eleven or twelve, around that that kind of age,
(41:11):
which is about the age that he says kids most
often learn to hold contradictory ideas about the world in
their head at the same time these you know, that's
the the idea of negative capability, the thing that allows
the ironic stance, and this allows them to see subtleties
of teasing and participate in it, especially on the receiving end,
(41:32):
in a more graceful way, without interpreting all of it
as bullying and bad. You know, that's one big difference
is that when you're an adult, it becomes you learn
how to take a joke usually, you know, like you
learn how to be the butt of a of a
good natured piece of criticism as long as it's not
like really cruel, uh, to be the butt of a
(41:54):
good natured piece of criticism or or teasing, and to
not get too upset about it. But kids don't have
this ability. They are not good at this at all.
Kids take themselves very seriously. All right, Well, on that note,
we're going to take one more break, and when we
come back we will discuss teasing in bonding. Thank alright,
(42:16):
we're back, So one of the funny things I discovered
in this episode is there's this entire academic journal called
Discourse Studies, all all kinds of research about the ways
people communicate, and they have this amazing way of like
mapping out conversations in a way that includes all this
information about tone and about gestures and laughter and how
(42:39):
different kinds of laughter sounded. It looks like computer code.
It's like conversations translated into cobal. You should look this
up if you get a chance. It's it's pretty interesting. Um.
But I was just looking at one study from Discourse
Studies in that was published this year in called getting
to Know You Teasing as an Invitor Patian to Intimacy
(43:01):
in Initial Interactions by Michael Hall and Danielle pill at
Shore and so that they write about how before the study,
teasing was often assumed to take place mostly or exclusively
between people who have previously who have previous relationships, who
have some degree of intimacy. But this article examined conversations
(43:22):
between unfamiliar people who were becoming acquainted, and I thought
this was interesting. They found that teasing does play a role, uh,
and the role it seems to play in this kind
of conversation and the getting to know you conversation is
a sort of experiment, is testing the new acquaintances willingness
to become more intimate, because I definitely know this feeling
(43:44):
like you're at a party or whatever, you know, any
place you've got to meet new people, and you're talking
to somebody new for the first time, and for a
while in that first conversation, you don't know if this
conversation will sort of escalate into a relationship and a
point of familiarity where you might start to think of
this person as a friend, or if you're just exchanging
(44:04):
pleasantries until you can move on, right, Yeah, So you
never know. Some sometimes you think it's gonna go one
way and it goes to the other. And this study
found that teasing plays an important role in this and
getting to know people as a bid for increased intimacy.
So the researchers taped and studied thirty initial interactions, twenty
four of which twenty four out of the thirty featured
(44:25):
one or more sequence of teasing. And the teases were
produced by and directed at both male and female speakers
of varying ages. And this is fascinating. The researchers discovered
that there was a clear pattern to the teasing exchange
in the initial conversations. So first, something teasable would happen.
There's a triggering action by the tease target that affords
(44:49):
the tease, and then second there's the tease at a quote,
a teasing action directed at the tease target. And then
third there's affiliation, a mutual ratification of the non seriousness
of the tease and the author's right quote given. Teasing
is one way of criticizing another. It constitutes a potential
(45:10):
breach of tact or interactional propriety in initial interactions. However,
participants can construe this potential impropriety as an invitation to intimacy,
as it involves the proposal of a shared ironic stance
that may be either accepted or declined by the target
of the tease. So teasing in initial interactions, teasing while
(45:32):
first getting to know somebody can essentially be an off
record invitation to escalate the interaction and open up possibilities
of friendship. It's a sort of ambiguous, off record way
of saying will you play with me? And of course
reading through these you know these like Cobal conversations. You
see that a lot of the signaling both ways here
(45:52):
is relegated to nonverbal signals. There's intonation, uh, facial expressions, laughter,
And you know, one thing I think about it is
how sometimes a teasing interaction doesn't even necessarily involve words,
Like think about this situation. Somebody says something teasable, and
all you really need to do for a subtle tease
is to respond with a certain facial expression or type
(46:14):
of laughter, and the teased person has the option of
either joining you and and laughing along with you, or
rejecting the bid to join you in the river of
irony and staying on dry land, at which point you
realize like, oh, okay, this conversation or this relationship is
not going to a friendly place, or that this is
not the this is not the safe point for teasing. Yeah,
(46:37):
I mean it's very possible. I think we can all
think the situations like this where you're kind of doing
this playful teasing and then you realize, oh, maybe this
individual is very serious about this particular aspect of their
personality or the world. Like they do not They're they're
not game for say, uh, you know, political based humor
or teasing, but they may be open in other areas.
(46:59):
And then it's also ultimately part of the social dynamic, right,
figuring out like what is the shape of my relationship
with this person and what is the shape of this
relationship going to be? What are the avenues for bonding
and teasing that can take place. Yeah, I was reading
another article about teasing as bonding and it talked about
how one of the main features of teasing is the
(47:22):
creation of distinct alliances between participants in a conversation. Of course,
you know, we we see this happen all the time.
Teasing is going on, and it forms factions in a conversation.
People can either join in with the teasing and now
they're on a team together, or they can like resist,
or they can you know, it's often a form of
(47:43):
like joining people together against an isolated recipient. And this
can take very cruel forms. Of course, this is where
it can very easily turn into bullying, where in group
members strengthened bonds by teasing somebody from the out group
or somebody new. But I've also noticed that this form
of teasing as alliance formation can be really positive. It
can have really really sweet forms. Here's one very specific
(48:08):
benign way I've seen happen a lot in my life.
It's when there's someone who's uncomfortable or unfamiliar in a
social group. Say a person's over at your house for
the first time and they've never been there before that
you know that they're not one of this this social
in group yet, and a member of that social in
group tries to make the new person feel comfortable and
(48:29):
welcome by inviting them to participate in teasing of another
member of the in group. Like A very common version
of this is I see, um, a wife trying to
make somebody feel welcome in her home by inviting that
guest to join in with her in teasing her husband. Okay, yeah,
(48:50):
I mean I can think of examples where my wife
has done this, where essentially what she's saying is like,
this is my husband, here's this nerdy thing he likes.
It's okay to tease him about it because as it
is part of our dynamic, and you can share to
a certain extent in this dynamic as well. Ha ha ha. Yeah. Yeah,
it's it's an inviting thing, and it also tells that
person it's safe here. It says you're not going to
(49:11):
get your head cut off for mocking the king, right right, Yeah,
beheading always a sign that that that a dinner party
is going terribly wrong. It's it's a demonstration that there
is no Jeoffrey in this house. But it's also a
form of social bonding and alliance formation. It allows the
person to feel like they are you know, the that
(49:31):
the crucial that the bull's eye of the in group
right now. Though then again, because because teasing has all
this in built ambiguity and risk, there there's always the
risk of seeing something like that edge into actual mean
spiritedness in a couple. You know, I hadn't really thought
about this before, but I was thinking of my own house.
A lot of teasing, linguistic teasing, mind you, is aimed
(49:56):
at our cat and our signing engaged in this is well,
you know, we we treat the cat obviously like a
like a queen. You know, she has even has a
pedestal that she lays upon, and you know she hasn't
made in the shade, and you think, yeah, we we
love the cat. But at the same time, we have
all sorts of ridiculous names for the cat. We're always going, oh,
(50:19):
what is the cat? Doing. Now we're essentially teasing the cat,
and it is a very safe zone for linguistic teasing,
you know, because the cat doesn't care. The cat doesn't
know what we're saying. Well, you know why cats are
great to tease. It's because they take themselves very seriously.
They do that, They are very to take themselves very seriously,
whereas there is there is certainly more of an air
of the jesture to the dog. Though we make fun
(50:41):
of our dog too, and he deserves it because he's
very funny. But it does make me wonder to what
extent pets then, you know, they they are enabling this
avenue of bonding. Uh that that that that involves teasing.
I think in this world where we're trying to be
sensitive and socially conscious and not and not hurt people
and necessarily but at the same time, but where we
(51:04):
also recognize the absolutely necessary value of positive teasing. If
we need like a theory, we need like a theory
of teasing to guide our teasing so so that we
we always understand where it's going and we don't accidentally
pilot it into the rocks of of of bullying. I agree.
I wonder if we need like posters, you know, sort
(51:25):
of like a military propaganda posters that are instructing us
about teasing, Like what is good teasing, what is bad teasing?
What is teasing accomplished? What should we tolerate? What should
we not tolerate? Yeah, I don't know exactly what the
best rules of the road are. I mean, I know
some things you should not do, but it would be
good to have positive rules as well. How do you
know you're on the right track when you're teasing somebody? Yeah,
(51:47):
for the most part, we're all just winging it, aren't we. Well,
I mean you're trying to you're trying to read read
their reaction, Like if it's good natured teasing, if it's
between people who are friends or in a relationship, they're
teasing each other that you know, you read their their
facial expressions and all that, and you can generally tell
if things are going well. But it's harder to tell
for some people than others. And it's harder to tell
(52:09):
in some situations than others. All Right, we're gonna go
and close it out there. But obviously this is a
topic that everyone is going to have some contribution for.
I mean, everyone has experience with teasing or being teased
both of you know as children is adolescence as adults
and UH, and we'd love to hear how you take
some of the ideas that we've discussed here to UH
(52:30):
to dissect teasing that has occurred in your life where
you see occurring around you. We'll tell you how to
reach out to us here in a minute. But first
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(53:35):
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(53:58):
Well more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com? They man
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault for an older episode. Uh.
This one originally aired September eleventh, two thousand eighteen, and
it's an episode we did about teasing. Yeah, this one,
this one was really fun, you know, getting into like
what teasing means, both when you know children are doing
(00:26):
it or if a parent is doing it like or
adults doing it to each other. Like what is this
thing we call teasing? And how does it factor into
the complexities of human communication and our social structures. Let's
jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind
from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey you, welcome to
(00:52):
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert, I've got a question
for you. You ever find yourself in that situation where
you're hanging out with people, it's all good fun, everybody's
there's banter going on. One person is teasing another person
over something kind of funny, some funny foible of their personality,
and there's that moment, there's that awful little moment where
(01:16):
there's kind of a pause after somebody says some some
teasing joke and then you realize like, oh no, suddenly
it has gotten serious. Oh yes, I mean it's especially
if it it's a multi person group and and there's
a bit of piling on occurring. They'll be there, I've
seen this, this happened, where they'll they'll be a breaking
(01:37):
point where the person has had enough and and and
you realize, oh, no, lines have been crossed and now
this person is gonna leave and we're gonna have to
resolve this uh via emails later. Uh yeah, And it's
as ter it's a terrible feeling because things have spiraled
out of control. Something that was playful and um and
just part of hanging out has now become divisive. Male
(02:00):
the best place to work out tents, social disputes, Well
sometimes sometimes it depends, and I mean, I guess it
depends on what role one had in the in the breakdown.
I've been fortunate enough to to not be like at
the epicenter of the of the breakdown generally, so um
email tends to suffice for me. You know, you never
(02:21):
have to worry that when you type a smiley emoji
that will look like a fake smile. When you actually
smile at somebody, you always gotta worry like does this
look real? Is my face moving? Right? So you just
have to use the authentic smiling emoji, not the unauthentic one.
You know, it's all on the micro expressions of the emoji.
What's the inauthentic one that's like colon and clothes brackets.
(02:41):
Oh no, I'm talking about the ones that actually, like
the little yellow face with a smile, like you'll know
it when you see it. Okay, but is everyone can
realize that at this point we're talking about teasing today
on the show, and teasing is weird territory to try
and figure out deceptively, so really um for many of
us looking back on our child hoods, it's it makes
up some of our worst memories of social interaction. And
(03:05):
as as a parent, I have a lot of apprehension
about it, you know, regarding my own child, the inevitable
struggles that he's gonna gonna face. And at the same time,
there's this weird cult of the tease that is often
difficult to understand. We see teasing in our media and
it's sometimes presented as in a fun comical light. We
also see adults for whom teasing is a standard part
(03:26):
of their interactions, not fighting with each other, but but
just picking in various ways that it's it seems like
they're just terms of endearments, joking, benign criticism. Yeah, and
it and uh, it's often a case where I look
at it and I realized, well, this is clearly part
of their social dynamic. It wouldn't necessarily work in my
social dynamic, but I guess it's okay. Uh. We see
(03:49):
it factor into courtship as well, which also has a
way of of seeming weird and sour at times of
an outside perspective. Well, I mean, there's there's two very
different ways it can take place. There's a kind you
can see, a kind of friendly sweet teasing that takes
place between people in the courtship relationship. And then there's
like the pickup artist version of it, where somebody's clearly
(04:10):
like making a power play, right. And then likewise, we
also see this this space, this sort of ambiguous space
where playful teasing gives over to what is clearly something
based in hate and abuse name calling, uh, that occurs
among children and even among adults. Obviously, even at the
highest levels of government, you see name calling used in
(04:33):
a in a hurtful fashion. So if you start, if
you start picking out, and I imagine a lot of
your doing this as well, thinking of all the varying
levels of teasing that are going on in your immediate
environment and um in politics and the media, etcetera. On
the street as you're driving your car and listen to
this podcast. You know, it's enough to make you wonder
if if we're just nothing more than just cruel apes
(04:56):
jockeying for social position. Uh, And it's any wonder we
managed to emerge from these social interactions with self esteem
and respect for our fellow humans. But part of the
issue here is that while all forms of teasing share
common features, there are at least three distinctive forms of
teasing that are often signal, that are often singled out
(05:17):
and definitely deserve mention here. Okay, well what would those
forms be? All right? Well, the first is pretty obvious,
and that is that is the hurtful teasing. And I
think it's one of those things where we all we
all know it when we see it right or hear it.
This is obviously the domain of bullying and harassment, and
yet at the same time it's the sort of teasing
you might see in a celebrity roast, or some of
(05:40):
you are more viciously charged humor or political humor. I
guess you could also say it's maybe the domain of
the jesture, the fool and the clown. Uh and important.
These are important roles throughout human history. Oh yeah, well,
I mean I might argue that the fool in the
Shakespearean sense requires its own category here, because the fool
has a lot of power and freedom, and that's important
(06:01):
power and freedom. Like they're the only member of the
lower classes who can point out the flaws of the
monarchs and the upper classes and get away with it.
There's something about the ridiculousness of the fool that allows
a critique of power that might result in a beheading
if you made the same critique in a serious tone.
And likewise, a king who beheads a jester every week
(06:25):
is a terrible king. They look weak. Yeah, it makes
the king look foolish if the king overreacts to a
to a comical critique, right, I think you're pointing Joffrey
from Game of Thrones, is this type of ruler where
you realize, oh, he's terrible, he's totally incompetent. Look how
thin skinny is against uh, the humorous criticism of the
(06:49):
court fool. Well, it codes so easily for us. I mean,
one of the clearest signs of a toxic personality is
somebody who's unable to accept criticism and even benign criticism,
or to be the butt of a joke, you know,
somebody who cannot tolerate that, right, especially because of the
positive role that teasing plays in our culture. I mean,
(07:10):
there's so much teasing that is not hurtful, hateful. I
mean it is a constant feature of conversation between friends,
between couples, between family members, between educators and the people
they educate. Teasing, you know, there's like a sweet, benign
form of teasing that's absolutely essential to these relationships. You know.
(07:31):
I do have to add one more thing about the
gesture first, though, Okay, And there is there is this
this curious aspect of the dynamic you see with kind
of a classic gesture situation, but also in modern political humor,
there are two extremes that are both equally well maybe
not equally, but they're both cringe worthy, certainly when the king,
(07:53):
the rule, or the politician, whoever the celebrity is too
thin skin to let humorous bashing go where they have
to call out, say, you know an episode of Saturday
Night Live, right, if you made a joke about me,
how dare you? Right? Yeah, that is is cringeworthy and awful.
But on the same hand, and this is something that
I believe It was pointed out on an episode of
(08:13):
Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist history podcast, there's also this danger in
what happens when the king says, yeah, this gesture guys great,
I'm going to hang out with him and do a
skit with him, or yeah, that's Saturday Night Life skit
is funny. I'm gonna appear on that Saturday Night Life
skit with the person doing an impression of me. There
can be uh, too much protection of one's dignity is
(08:36):
a bad sign, but too much surrender of one's dignity
also looks kind of bad. Like, you gotta find the
middle ground. You want the ruler that that ultimately has
very little to do with the gesture and doesn't politely
laughs perhaps but leaves it at that. I know exactly
what you're talking about, Like when presidential candidates go on SNL,
that's always like, I don't know, it's just always terrible. Yeah.
(08:59):
But one of the points that Malcolm Gladwell made in
his shows that it takes the punch out of the
political humor, like you managed in a way, it's like
it's a genius move I guess for the politician, because
you have you have killed the humorous skit. You have
you have killed the power of the humor in a
way that you could never do by attacking it. Well, yeah,
I guess it doesn't make you look great, but it
(09:20):
also is a type of defense mechanism. It undercuts any
truly biting criticism that's hidden there in the in the
comedy if you go on stage with the comedian. Yes,
but before we were talking about the Jester, we were
we were about to get into playful teasing, you know,
the sweet form of teasing, right, And obviously there's a
(09:41):
line between hurtful and and u and playful teasing. Good
luck finding, especially with people you're maybe not that familiar with.
But yeah, especially in close relationships, you tend to see
these you know, you see in jokes and you see
established safe zones for playful teasing. Uh. For instance, if
my wife teases me about some nerdy hobby of mine, Uh,
(10:04):
it's it's really more of a form, more of a
term of endearment. Or if she teases me about liking
robot music, like like really robotic sounding electronic music, and
uh and teasing me about how awful it sounds. Uh,
like like this is that this feels good when we're
doing it. I don't feel hurt or defensive about you know,
my my love of dungeons and dragons, or or or
(10:28):
my miniatures painting miniatures, or yeah, or my affinity for
the music of autech or that sort of thing. Yeah.
I think almost all good romantic relationships include an element
of teasing. I don't you know. I don't want to
be overly general. So maybe some people people make it
work in all kinds of ways, but I rarely see
what seems like a happy couple that doesn't tease one another, right,
(10:50):
I mean, it seems like you do. And this is
something we're gonna return to throughout this episode. This idea
that that teasing it is is an opportunity for bond
for me and the establishment and the maintaining of bonds.
And but obviously you need a safe place for the
teasing just you know that all of us, I think
we're going to have unless we are some sort of
(11:12):
like inhuman politician type, you know, we're going to have
those areas that we are cool being teased about in
areas that we're less comfortable being teased about. You know,
thinking about several of the areas that that teasing functions
in our our social interactions, one of which is sort
of reminding people of hierarchies or establishing hierarchies. That it
(11:33):
does something of enforcing a pecking order. Number two is
maybe like establishing a criticism of somebody's behavior, and number
three is allowing bonding. Put these three things together, and
it seems like a key place where teasing should come
into play is education, right, because that's a place where
you need a hierarchy between teacher and student. You want
(11:54):
to teach lessons and you also want to have a
good relationship. That's right. So this brings us to this
third area of teasing, educative teasing, and this pops up
in areas that you wouldn't quite expect it as as
we'll discuss a little later. One example is that is
that of a frat boys giving each other's nicknames based on,
you know, various bone headed things they've done. Uh and
(12:16):
and this can be viewed as a way of of educating,
of laying down various um moral rules or or social expectations.
Right d a teasing, you might get nicknamed like, I
don't know, toilet head because you fell asleep with your
head in the toilet, right, And the idea is, don't
do that, don't drink so much that you sleep in
the toilet. But then again, one of the things I
(12:39):
noticed about that kind of teasing is that toilet head
might originally be applied as a sort of like moral injunction,
but the toilet head make may well come to identify
with the nickname and say, that's right, that's who I am.
I am toilet head forevermore, and I will embrace it. Yeah. Now,
some anthropology just point to specific traditions of educated teasing
(13:03):
between parents and children in various Indigenous American um cultures,
and the idea here is that it's a form of
teasing that can work better to impart knowledge of social
rules and emotionally instilled ideas. However, we We didn't really
focus on any of that for this research, but I
just want to let everyone know that that that is
an area of study now. As far as these three
(13:25):
terms for types of teasing go, I I feel like
there's some difficulty in how we use terms here because
I admit that I would typically reserve the word teasing
for the more benign or playful forms, like what we
were calling hurtful teasing, the kind that's actually cruel and
mean spirited. I would not usually call teasing. I'd probably
(13:46):
call it bullying or harassment or something. Um though. It's
what What this highlights is that the line between playful
teasing and hurtful bullying is not always clear. It's not
always clear to the person doing it, It's always not
always clear to the person receiving it. What sometimes ment
is benign or playful by the teaser can feel like
(14:07):
bullying to the tea Z and sometimes more benign or
playful forms of teasing. I bet you've been there for this.
I think we sort of talked about it at the beginning.
It starts off as a friendly and playful session of
ribbing that somehow catches this terrible momentum. I don't know
what causes it, but that momentum it edges into harder
and meaner stuff as it escalates, and it's this enormously
(14:31):
painful and uncomfortable thing to witness. And looking back, I
can remember instances of this in my life where I
watch something like this happened to somebody else, and in retrospect,
like I wish I'd found a way to step in
in the moment and stop it. But it's so much
easier to to to feel that kind of policing authority
in retrospect in the moment, to step in like that
(14:54):
into clear teasing to have gone too far requires you
to take this major risk. It feels like you're violating
a taboo. You're making it weird. You know you know
about making it weird right um, And in the moment
you're never really sure if you've like misread some kind
of unspoken set of cues. Maybe everything's actually okay, and
you're the one who's making people feel bad by getting
(15:16):
serious from out of nowhere. It can be a really
difficult and complicated UH dance to to navigate. All right,
on that note, we're gonna take a quick break and
when we come back, we're gonna we're gonna really get
into the question of teasing and what purpose it truly serves. Alright,
we're back. So one of the big names that comes
(15:36):
up in teasing research is that of psychiatry and psychology
researcher Dr Keltner, who has written on this, researched on this,
and one of the big pieces that is often circulated
is a two thousand and eight New York Times piece
titled in Defense of Teasing. Uh, And he also directs
the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab, So this is like right
(15:59):
in his uh, his area of focus. Yeah. Kiltner makes
an interesting point, which is that a lot of our
social conventions in the modern age, I think, are centered
around trying to make social interactions more safe, which in
a way is a good thing. Right. We we all
know how destructive and terrible bullying can be. We've all
(16:20):
seen the kind of teasing in a relationship and you know, uh,
somebody's somebody's got a new boyfriend and he's teasing her,
but he's like going a little hard. It doesn't quite
seem so sweet. And when you think about stuff like that,
it can be very easy to start to start to
view teasing is this really negative thing. It's this this cruel,
(16:42):
malicious force that permeates our culture and and make you
want to do things to eliminate it. Right, Well, how
can we get people to not act like this? But
I feel like teasing is a situation where you really
don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Well you don't, but you you want to protect the bank.
That's the thing. I mean throughout this episode, I kept
(17:03):
coming I keep coming back to UM, my own son,
and I just want to protect him so much from
these things. At the same time, I realized I can't
protect him there from everything. I can't just chadow him
through school and you know, feed him excellent, you know comebacks. Uh,
anytime anybody is is trying to tease him, he's going
to be teased. It's it's inevitable, and he it's probably
(17:26):
inevitable to that to engage in teasing Um. But at
the same time, it is hard for me to just
really get behind everything Kelton is saying about just the
importance of teasing, Like I still my impulse to protect
is too strong. Well, I mean, I think the point
he would be making is the good kind of teasing
(17:49):
is not actually hurtful. It's not actually something that needs
to be protected. And he's not advocating that that bullying
should be permitted. It's very clear about that. But but
but he does, let's make this strong, strong case that
that teasing is an essential part of our social interactions.
And in fact, he points out that the teasing is
pervasive in the animal world. Right now, we generally think
(18:11):
of teasing as uh, well, you know, as a verbal phenomenon, right,
and I guess you do have to think of of
human teasing as as a lot of things with humans
happens to be you think of it as a linguistic
and cultural complication of an impulse that may also be
found within uh languageless animals. And so, for instance, Keltner says, quote,
(18:35):
the centrality of teasing in our social evolution is suggested
by just how pervasive teasing is in the animal world.
Younger monkeys pull the tales of older monkeys. African hunting
dogs jump all over one another, much like pad slapping
joking football players moments before kickoff. In every corner of
the world, human adults play peekaboo games to stir a
(18:57):
sulking child. Children as early as age one and mimic
nearby adults and teenagers prod one another to gauge romantic interest.
In rejecting teasing, we may be losing something vital and
necessary to our identity as the most playful of species.
I mean, I think I'm pretty on board with his
message there. It's the the difficulty comes in our uncertainty
(19:20):
about recognizing the line between benign teasing and hurtful teasing.
And and I think it's because there's that ambiguity, because
there's always the danger that you you're not necessarily going
to be able to recognize immediately the difference between one
or the other. It's exactly the same problem I was
mentioning a minute ago, where you like, think back on
(19:40):
a time you saw somebody getting teased and went over
the line, but you didn't stop it. Um, it's because
of that ambiguity, like you didn't know if you should
step in or not. And that ambiguity makes us uncomfortable
because we know teasing this over the line is wrong,
but you can't always see the line in the moment.
It would be interesting to hear from from Edrick writers
out there who are listening to the show on this
(20:02):
because it does make one think that the message should
not be hey, kids don't tease one another. It should
maybe be more here areas where it is not cool
to tease. You like, it's not cool to tease someone
about their physical appearance or the characters or stereotypes, etcetera. Um,
but various behavioral teasing. I don't know how, I mean,
(20:23):
how do you end up teaching such nuance? Maybe you
to a certain extent, you can't. It has to generate
via the social interactions. Here's something I would say, Um, well,
with a with a big exception for we can talk
about the jester in a second. With a big exception
for the jester. Maybe one thing is that you shouldn't
tease somebody unless you like them and they know you
(20:44):
like them. That's true because otherwise, if the if the
existing social dynamic is is anything different than you are
perhaps not engaging in pure teasing. No, I mean, then
it becomes bullying. When you tease somebody you don't even
like her respect obviously you're you're going to be tempted
to edge over into some form of cruelty. Now, speaking
(21:04):
of cruelty, we have to think a kaind of of kings,
and of course the jester. Keltner points out that that
in the tradition of the court jester, you could say
teasing is quote, a playful, provocative mode of commentary. Yeah,
I think that's right. I mean, as Touchstone said and
Shakespeare's as you like it quote, the fool don't think
he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to
(21:27):
be a fool. You know, that's hundreds of years before
all the modern research on illusory confidence and dunning Krueger
and all that. I think this reveals that a key
social good of even harder edge teasing is that when
it's properly applied, it can be kind of a leveling tool,
Like it knocks down the wicker men of big egos
and and pops the balloons of unearned self confidence that
(21:49):
we see so often in our highest levels of leadership.
But of course, just as often it's applied the other way,
and in a very bad, destructive way. It gets applied
from the top down by the inflated ego against the
less empowered. I guess it's sort of like a hierarchy
enforcement mechanism. But the bottom up form, the jester driven form.
(22:09):
I think that's a that leveling instinct is a useful
social good and a form of freedom. Teasing is an
arena that allows us to experiment with language, with personality
and relationships. It's sort of an open ended game that
we can use to manage relationships and learn about each other. Now,
Calton and Keltner also turns to the work of linguistic
anthropologist Penelope Brown and cognitive anthropologist Stephen Levinson, who I
(22:35):
believe we've we've touched on both of their work before
on the podcast, but their work that he's referencing here
is more specifically aligned with the study of politeness. But
of interest here is the their focus on two forms
of communication, like basically breaking down communication into two forms.
So we're talking mostly about linguistic communication here, but on
(22:58):
the on record communication and off record communication. Okay, so
tell me the difference. Okay. So on record communication is
just literal direct speech. You take it literally. It's meant
meant to be taken literally. It's clear, and it's direct.
This is the kind of speech you would want from
your doctor or your lawyer or whatever. Right if you
if someone were to come up to you on the
(23:20):
street and uh and say, hey, you've got something on
your face? Um, Like that's clear, Like, hey, I think
there's some food on your face. You need you might
want to get that off Like they're they're not playing around.
They're just letting you know. It might be socially awkward,
but they are being direct in their communication. They're they're
not they're not joking, they're not being vague about it.
Off the record is veiled meeting metaphor alternative meaning. So
(23:45):
this is if someone were to come up on your
street and be like, hey, um, you got a little
something right there. Hey, if you you know, if they
were kind of kind of beat around the bush a
little bit, you know, you might want to take a
look in a mirror. Bro right, Yeah, that kind of
thing where it can it's off the record, and it
can be in a way that is meant to, uh
to make the the the message softer, or it can
(24:07):
go the reverse, right, it can it can make it harder.
You could be straight up mocking somebody on the street
for the little bit of lunch they still have, you know,
caught in their beard. Yeah, it seems the key to
the off record communication is is some form of ambiguity.
And one reason is that off record communication is sometimes risky, right,
people want deniability if their message is not well received.
(24:30):
Off record communication is the kind of communication where you
can say I was just kidding. On record communication, you
cannot plausibly say I was just kidding. And you've all
been there when somebody delivered on record communication and then
tried to I was just kidding afterwards. It doesn't work there. No,
there's generally no room for for retreat, except to like
(24:52):
physically retreat. So the point here is that in modern
human interactions, you don't always want to be direct on record.
Your communication doesn't always work for the same reasons that
it's not practical to always be truthful. White lies are
sometimes required or lies of emission. Uh, And so it's
it's sometimes necessary to communicate via off record communication to
(25:14):
say something and signal some other meaning, as annoying as
it can be at times. Obviously, we can all think
too situations where someone is not direct with us and
we wish they were direct. Oh yeah, I mean pretty
much everything we're talking about today that has a possible
good social good, you know, useful social role also can
(25:34):
be used for evil. I mean, every shifty, dishonest guy
you know uses a lot of off record communication and
always wants to be able to kind of weasel around
about what he said or what he meant, And so
Kellner argues that teasing is quote just such an act
of off record communication. Provocative commentary is shrouded in linguistic
acts called off record markers that suggests that commentary should
(25:59):
not be taken literally. So there's some sort of uh,
there's some sort of a wink there, right, But I
don't think this should cause us to sort uh communication
into like on record which is important, and off record
which is not important. Yeah, I mean, to your point,
it may be very important. It just might be socially delicate,
(26:19):
or you don't want to overstep the boundaries of your
established relationship with someone, and it may be essential to
to to to to to provide that wink to let
them know via you know, some sort of hand signal
or some alteration of your voice, or even the use
of rhyme or the mimicking of of of of some
other individual. It could be key to letting them know
(26:41):
I'm I'm using off record communication here, even even though
what I'm about to tell you is important. Well, yeah,
it's on record communication and off record communication. I would
say our respectively analogous to work and play, and play
is very important. Play is where we learn how to work. Ultimately,
it allows us to send messages in a in a
masked way or at least a kind of like a
(27:03):
lubricated way. Socially. Uh, this this may be a terrible example,
but but one that I have observed before. If you've
ever seen say an individual come out of a public
restroom and uh, and they say, who do not go
in there, or give you some sort of like joking warning,
that's a good one. Made. It tends it are it
Definitely I would say definitely works better than if they
(27:26):
were to look you square in the eyes and say
do not go in there. Though that's sort of like
five minutes, you know, Like then that's self deprecating. Yeah,
but it's also it's like awkward for both parties. But
if but if there's a joke there, like then it's
kind of like I'm kind of making fun of myself
and I'm also kind of making fun of fun of you.
But I'm also providing definite information that you should be
(27:47):
aware of regarding the the the aromatic state of this bathroom.
You're about to enter well to to incorporate teasing. I
can see how in that situation, teasing if somebody else
could actually be used to diffuse tension and make them
feel less bad. So like say you have to go
into a bathroom after somebody else and it smells bad,
and the other person knows that they've been in there,
(28:09):
and you know they're probably feeling embarrassed. You might be
able to say something that's like a tease of them
that indicates that they shouldn't actually be You know, you
can both laugh about it, which actually feels better than
just leaving it, leaving it unsaid and the person feeling
awkward and embarrassed. Though I'm not necessarily advocating making fun
of people's body smells, You've got to judge the situation
(28:30):
case by case, Keltner says. Quote in teasing, we become actors,
taking on playful identities to manage the inevitable conflicts of
living in social groups, which is as kind of crude
as this example we just laid out, is it. I mean,
that is an example of what we're talking about here.
I mean that is the inevitable conflict of living in
social groups, of going to restaurants and sharing restaurants, and
(28:51):
they also may allow us Keltner argues to engage in
the sort of social contest that may prove physical and
deadly in other species and ded we see plenty of
non human species that have evolved drama dramatized status contests
that don't involve combat. You know, uh, some sort of
like feathery display or or even a display of something
(29:12):
that might otherwise be used for for combat. But some mean,
some means of of engaging in social contest that doesn't
actually require two individuals to to fight until one backs off. Yeah,
I don't know if this is the kind I would
call teasing. I guess there might be elements you call
this gets up against when exactly I would actually use
(29:34):
the word again, But it's clearly Yeah, it's clearly part
of human culture that we use words and like insults
and humor and stuff like that to manage hierarchy navigation.
You're trying to take down the person above you, and
you can do it with a witty comment. But stuff
like that isn't always isn't always in this playful, sweet
(29:57):
realm of teasing. I mean that kind of stuff can
actually you pretty biting, right. But but the argument here
is that even in playful teasing, there is this potential
for uh for establishment of a pecking order. And that's
just another way that teasing and requires us to walk
a fine line right enhancing social connection while also establishing
(30:17):
a pecking order. Like it's sounds it's one of those
things that when you when you boil it down, um,
like imagine like setting out to do that consciously, like
all right, I've gotta I need to walk into the
office today. I needed I need to tear everybody down
just the appropriate amount so that we all feel a
little closer, but also that it's so that everybody thinks
that I'm superior or that I have the appropriate place
(30:40):
in the social dynamics of the office. You're describing management
strategy probably probably so no, no, no, that's not fair.
But yeah, I mean, I unfortunately, I think there are
some people who are that deliberate and that calculating about
the kind of stuff they say in a workplace. They're
not just talking to you about whatever they're thinking abou out.
(31:00):
They're making a comment to you in front of an
audience based on how it will benefit them. Now, we
mentioned frat frat brothers. Earlier, Keltner observed it among frat brothers.
In one study, teasing nicknames seemed to be quote more
morality plays based on misdeeds that they were encouraged to
move beyond. And among teens, teasing is a vital part
(31:20):
of a flirtation, a way of testing out others and
looking for genuine signs of interest. Yeah, and as I
mentioned earlier, I mean I feel like this can easily
go two ways. There is a very sweet kind of
teasing that takes that takes place in courtship, and then
there's definitely a gross form of it that's some kind
of social leverage trick, right, And then there's also something
(31:42):
problematic too about like if you established this rule that like, oh,
they're teasing you because they like you, like, then that
that and that may be the case, I mean that
it often is the case. It clearly is. But if
you but then it goes too far. If you established it,
then is this excuse for for problem amatic teasing, right,
like oh, that's just boys being boys or girls being girls?
(32:04):
Then you know, is it or are we using that
to cover up something that should be um policed in
some fashion? Well, often we are. This is yet another
case where it would be great if we could always
clearly see what the line is. And people's discomfort comes
in because sometimes it's not clear where the line is. Now.
On the subject of of teasing among committed partners, uh,
(32:25):
he points out that there is a language to it,
you know, they're all these little in jokes, and he
points to two studies that have shown that married couples
with a rich vocabulary of you know, various teasing nicknames
and ends of formulate insults, they tend to be happier
and more satisfied. And that's the sweet kind. Yeah. And
he also adds that it may help diffuse arguments over
(32:48):
really explosive issues, and that the terminology of the teasing
as well as often drawn from the same metaphors we
use for for love. They have to do, for instance,
with with food or small animals, right, like referring to
somebody as like a dum playing or a muffin or
something like that, or a or a bunny. Yes, though
(33:08):
apparently they did. It does depend on the language. Here.
I remember speaking with U, an individual of Thai descent,
and about how the use of pig or piggy or
you know, it's tie equivalent was a term of endearment,
especially for young children, whereas in English that the term
(33:30):
maybe has a has a bit more like spike to it,
if you're gonna call someone a pick or a piggy.
So a term of endearment in one language or culture
is not necessarily going to translate equally into another language.
Oh but I can actually see, like even in English,
a great novel where you establish a character's relationship, what
we're like, a wife calls her husband little piggy or something.
(33:51):
That seems that that's good, that's good character right there. Yeah. Now,
there's a ton of material out there on teasing, and
we can't possibly touch on all of it here today.
After all, it does seem to be a major aspect
of human social dynamics, and the legacy of childhood teasing
seems to be quite long. A lot of studies look
at childhood teasing and and the ramifications of it for adults. Yeah,
(34:14):
a lot of what I saw was just study after
study looking at whether child whether children perceived teasing as
harmful or not, and generally they did. Now, one of
one of the problems here is that it does come
down to that perception, how is the instance of teasing perceived?
And and and here we see this this this this
case where an instance of teasing might well be perceived
(34:36):
by one party as being playful and another party as
being harmful. I mean, going back to our initial example.
You know, in in group social dynamics, where someone goes
over the line, I mean most of the most of
the cases, and the person is not thinking I'm going
over the line, I'm going for it, I'm gonna go
for the hurt point. Here, well, sometimes they are, I mean,
(34:57):
there there are clearly different categories here. There is like
very often teasing is going to be perceived as good
natured by the person doing the teasing and as mean
and hurtful by the person receiving the teasing. But also
there there are two different versions of what's going on
in the perpetrator's mind. You've definitely seen cases where somebody
(35:18):
who genuinely meant no harm accidentally hurt somebody's feelings with teasing.
And then you see cases where people try to cover
their butts afterwards, like clearly they let some you know,
hurtful inclinations reveal itself too much. They were being mean,
but then afterwards they can be they can retreat. It's
off record communication, so they can be like, oh, I
(35:39):
was just kidding. I didn't mean any harm, don't you know,
don't get upset. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings,
but they kind of did, right. Yeah, I was looking
at a paper here, two thousand paper titled I Was
Only Kidding Victims and Perpetrators Perceptions of Teasing by Robin M. Kowowski,
and he points out that via seventy two person study,
I found that perspectives might refer lect of the views
(36:01):
of perpetrators and victims. The teaser remembers it more as
fun and focused on behavior, and the person being teased
remembers it more as hurtful and potentially focusing on their appearance. Yeah,
that's another thing. So one area in which teasing, I
think is just never acceptable. I mean you just never
want to go there is teasing about innate characteristics, not
(36:22):
not like about what somebody just did, but about what
they look like about their body, about fundamental personality issues.
It comes back to like the educative aspect of teasing,
like you can you if it's if it's if there's
something educative about it, it's like you should be doing
this differently, where you should have done this differently. But
I mean, you know, people for the for the vast
(36:44):
most part, cannot do anything about their their physical appearance,
you know. But but I've I'm sure you've seen this
where people tease somebody and it edges into teasing about
innate characteristics, and when they get called out, they try
to retreat to to like pretending they were just reacting
to behavior or something. No, no, no, no, I didn't
(37:06):
mean that, I meant this other thing. Yeah, Or they're
kind of like, oh, I'm sorry. I thought we were
just being mean, and so I was going to be
mean too. I didn't realize that we were being playful
or that we were critiquing things they had choices about. Now,
this this leads me to a question that I've I've
had in my mind for a little while here, and
that is, do certain people invite more playful and potentially
(37:28):
hurtful teasing than others, and if so, what are the factors?
So I've observed this in social situations in the past.
I'm sure a number of our listeners have as well.
In social dynamics, some individuals seem to attract more teasing
attention than others. And why is that? I think based
on some of what we've discussed here so far, we
could we could really point to various causes apparent social status,
(37:52):
attractiveness and desirability, but also difference outside or status, really
any area that would seem to invite, invite off the
record linguistic attention right. Well, because teasing has so many
different uses and meanings, there are a lot of different
ways that it can be attracted. I mean, one thing
that you can see is that obviously in hurtful teasing,
(38:14):
you know, the kind of cruel the thing I wouldn't
usually call teasing cruel, mean spirited bullying. I think the
people who attract that are people who look like easy targets,
people who are lower status in the community where they're
being teased, people who have less power to respond. I mean,
bullies pick on people they perceive to have a weakness. Now,
(38:36):
when it comes to the jester type of of teasing,
I think obviously they're the people who are going to
be attracting it, are going to be prominent, high status people,
and high status people also tend to invite the different
kind of teasing that's not even really teasing. But Keltner
talked about it in this article when he talked about
how frat brothers give each other nicknames. There's a kind
(38:57):
of teasing as praise that frat pledges show towards the
senior brothers of the fraternity. Uh. So it's structured like teasing,
but it's really more of a veiled compliment. Do you
know what I'm talking about. I'm sure you've seen this before,
where like people will be obsequious by pretending to rib
somebody above them, but in a way that's not actually
(39:20):
for anything bad they did, but really is more for
something good about them. Yeah. Yeah, you do see examples
of this, uh from time to time, almost kind of
getting into the idea of like hot shaming somebody, right,
like making fun of them for being attractive, making fun
of them for being successful or something that in that regard.
I mean, obviously in the fraternity context, a lot of
(39:43):
this is going to be like pretending to rib an
older frat brother for his you know, drinking ability, or
his sexual prowess or something. Uh. It's not really in
that context perceived as an insult, but they structure it
like one. It's a strange phenomenon. But but come back
to other people who seem to invite I think one
thing that is common to most forms of more barbed
(40:07):
teasing is that it's invited by people who do not
appear to have a very well developed sense of humor,
or people who appear to take themselves very seriously. I'm
sure you've observed this, right, Robert, Yes, I've definitely seen
this h in play, you know, in various work environments
over over the years, where the person who takes themselves
(40:29):
very seriously just it almost requires you to to take
them down a pay not if they can't laugh at themselves, right,
I mean, and then this is something that's not necessarily
going to take place like face to face obviously, Like
like if you have a say you have a boss
that is just really self involved, you you cannot help
(40:49):
but make fun of them with a co worker, you know,
regardless of if you if you ever do anything or
say anything that you know that that that individual is
ever gonna hear, you still have to at least joke
about them, uh with your other coworkers. Right, And as
Keltner points out, the dynamics of teasing tend to change
dramatically around eleven or twelve, around that that kind of age,
(41:11):
which is about the age that he says kids most
often learn to hold contradictory ideas about the world in
their head at the same time these you know, that's
the the idea of negative capability, the thing that allows
the ironic stance, and this allows them to see subtleties
of teasing and participate in it, especially on the receiving end,
(41:32):
in a more graceful way, without interpreting all of it
as bullying and bad. You know, that's one big difference
is that when you're an adult, it becomes you learn
how to take a joke usually, you know, like you
learn how to be the butt of a of a
good natured piece of criticism as long as it's not
like really cruel, uh, to be the butt of a
(41:54):
good natured piece of criticism or or teasing, and to
not get too upset about it. But kids don't have
this ability. They are not good at this at all.
Kids take themselves very seriously. All right, Well, on that note,
we're going to take one more break, and when we
come back we will discuss teasing in bonding. Thank alright,
(42:16):
we're back, So one of the funny things I discovered
in this episode is there's this entire academic journal called
Discourse Studies, all all kinds of research about the ways
people communicate, and they have this amazing way of like
mapping out conversations in a way that includes all this
information about tone and about gestures and laughter and how
(42:39):
different kinds of laughter sounded. It looks like computer code.
It's like conversations translated into cobal. You should look this
up if you get a chance. It's it's pretty interesting. Um.
But I was just looking at one study from Discourse
Studies in that was published this year in called getting
to Know You Teasing as an Invitor Patian to Intimacy
(43:01):
in Initial Interactions by Michael Hall and Danielle pill at
Shore and so that they write about how before the study,
teasing was often assumed to take place mostly or exclusively
between people who have previously who have previous relationships, who
have some degree of intimacy. But this article examined conversations
(43:22):
between unfamiliar people who were becoming acquainted, and I thought
this was interesting. They found that teasing does play a role, uh,
and the role it seems to play in this kind
of conversation and the getting to know you conversation is
a sort of experiment, is testing the new acquaintances willingness
to become more intimate, because I definitely know this feeling
(43:44):
like you're at a party or whatever, you know, any
place you've got to meet new people, and you're talking
to somebody new for the first time, and for a
while in that first conversation, you don't know if this
conversation will sort of escalate into a relationship and a
point of familiarity where you might start to think of
this person as a friend, or if you're just exchanging
(44:04):
pleasantries until you can move on, right, Yeah, So you
never know. Some sometimes you think it's gonna go one
way and it goes to the other. And this study
found that teasing plays an important role in this and
getting to know people as a bid for increased intimacy.
So the researchers taped and studied thirty initial interactions, twenty
four of which twenty four out of the thirty featured
(44:25):
one or more sequence of teasing. And the teases were
produced by and directed at both male and female speakers
of varying ages. And this is fascinating. The researchers discovered
that there was a clear pattern to the teasing exchange
in the initial conversations. So first, something teasable would happen.
There's a triggering action by the tease target that affords
(44:49):
the tease, and then second there's the tease at a quote,
a teasing action directed at the tease target. And then
third there's affiliation, a mutual ratification of the non seriousness
of the tease and the author's right quote given. Teasing
is one way of criticizing another. It constitutes a potential
(45:10):
breach of tact or interactional propriety in initial interactions. However,
participants can construe this potential impropriety as an invitation to intimacy,
as it involves the proposal of a shared ironic stance
that may be either accepted or declined by the target
of the tease. So teasing in initial interactions, teasing while
(45:32):
first getting to know somebody can essentially be an off
record invitation to escalate the interaction and open up possibilities
of friendship. It's a sort of ambiguous, off record way
of saying will you play with me? And of course
reading through these you know these like Cobal conversations. You
see that a lot of the signaling both ways here
(45:52):
is relegated to nonverbal signals. There's intonation, uh, facial expressions, laughter,
And you know, one thing I think about it is
how sometimes a teasing interaction doesn't even necessarily involve words,
Like think about this situation. Somebody says something teasable, and
all you really need to do for a subtle tease
is to respond with a certain facial expression or type
(46:14):
of laughter, and the teased person has the option of
either joining you and and laughing along with you, or
rejecting the bid to join you in the river of
irony and staying on dry land, at which point you
realize like, oh, okay, this conversation or this relationship is
not going to a friendly place, or that this is
not the this is not the safe point for teasing. Yeah,
(46:37):
I mean it's very possible. I think we can all
think the situations like this where you're kind of doing
this playful teasing and then you realize, oh, maybe this
individual is very serious about this particular aspect of their
personality or the world. Like they do not They're they're
not game for say, uh, you know, political based humor
or teasing, but they may be open in other areas.
(46:59):
And then it's also ultimately part of the social dynamic, right,
figuring out like what is the shape of my relationship
with this person and what is the shape of this
relationship going to be? What are the avenues for bonding
and teasing that can take place. Yeah, I was reading
another article about teasing as bonding and it talked about
how one of the main features of teasing is the
(47:22):
creation of distinct alliances between participants in a conversation. Of course,
you know, we we see this happen all the time.
Teasing is going on, and it forms factions in a conversation.
People can either join in with the teasing and now
they're on a team together, or they can like resist,
or they can you know, it's often a form of
(47:43):
like joining people together against an isolated recipient. And this
can take very cruel forms. Of course, this is where
it can very easily turn into bullying, where in group
members strengthened bonds by teasing somebody from the out group
or somebody new. But I've also noticed that this form
of teasing as alliance formation can be really positive. It
can have really really sweet forms. Here's one very specific
(48:08):
benign way I've seen happen a lot in my life.
It's when there's someone who's uncomfortable or unfamiliar in a
social group. Say a person's over at your house for
the first time and they've never been there before that
you know that they're not one of this this social
in group yet, and a member of that social in
group tries to make the new person feel comfortable and
(48:29):
welcome by inviting them to participate in teasing of another
member of the in group. Like A very common version
of this is I see, um, a wife trying to
make somebody feel welcome in her home by inviting that
guest to join in with her in teasing her husband. Okay, yeah,
(48:50):
I mean I can think of examples where my wife
has done this, where essentially what she's saying is like,
this is my husband, here's this nerdy thing he likes.
It's okay to tease him about it because as it
is part of our dynamic, and you can share to
a certain extent in this dynamic as well. Ha ha ha. Yeah. Yeah,
it's it's an inviting thing, and it also tells that
person it's safe here. It says you're not going to
(49:11):
get your head cut off for mocking the king, right right, Yeah,
beheading always a sign that that that a dinner party
is going terribly wrong. It's it's a demonstration that there
is no Jeoffrey in this house. But it's also a
form of social bonding and alliance formation. It allows the
person to feel like they are you know, the that
(49:31):
the crucial that the bull's eye of the in group
right now. Though then again, because because teasing has all
this in built ambiguity and risk, there there's always the
risk of seeing something like that edge into actual mean
spiritedness in a couple. You know, I hadn't really thought
about this before, but I was thinking of my own house.
A lot of teasing, linguistic teasing, mind you, is aimed
(49:56):
at our cat and our signing engaged in this is well,
you know, we we treat the cat obviously like a
like a queen. You know, she has even has a
pedestal that she lays upon, and you know she hasn't
made in the shade, and you think, yeah, we we
love the cat. But at the same time, we have
all sorts of ridiculous names for the cat. We're always going, oh,
(50:19):
what is the cat? Doing. Now we're essentially teasing the cat,
and it is a very safe zone for linguistic teasing,
you know, because the cat doesn't care. The cat doesn't
know what we're saying. Well, you know why cats are
great to tease. It's because they take themselves very seriously.
They do that, They are very to take themselves very seriously,
whereas there is there is certainly more of an air
of the jesture to the dog. Though we make fun
(50:41):
of our dog too, and he deserves it because he's
very funny. But it does make me wonder to what
extent pets then, you know, they they are enabling this
avenue of bonding. Uh that that that that involves teasing.
I think in this world where we're trying to be
sensitive and socially conscious and not and not hurt people
and necessarily but at the same time, but where we
(51:04):
also recognize the absolutely necessary value of positive teasing. If
we need like a theory, we need like a theory
of teasing to guide our teasing so so that we
we always understand where it's going and we don't accidentally
pilot it into the rocks of of of bullying. I agree.
I wonder if we need like posters, you know, sort
(51:25):
of like a military propaganda posters that are instructing us
about teasing, Like what is good teasing, what is bad teasing?
What is teasing accomplished? What should we tolerate? What should
we not tolerate? Yeah, I don't know exactly what the
best rules of the road are. I mean, I know
some things you should not do, but it would be
good to have positive rules as well. How do you
know you're on the right track when you're teasing somebody? Yeah,
(51:47):
for the most part, we're all just winging it, aren't we. Well,
I mean you're trying to you're trying to read read
their reaction, Like if it's good natured teasing, if it's
between people who are friends or in a relationship, they're
teasing each other that you know, you read their their
facial expressions and all that, and you can generally tell
if things are going well. But it's harder to tell
for some people than others. And it's harder to tell
(52:09):
in some situations than others. All Right, we're gonna go
and close it out there. But obviously this is a
topic that everyone is going to have some contribution for.
I mean, everyone has experience with teasing or being teased
both of you know as children is adolescence as adults
and UH, and we'd love to hear how you take
some of the ideas that we've discussed here to UH
(52:30):
to dissect teasing that has occurred in your life where
you see occurring around you. We'll tell you how to
reach out to us here in a minute. But first
of all, stuff toblew your mind dot com. That of course,
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(53:35):
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(53:58):
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