"In Defense of Teasing"

As it appeared in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday, Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, writes an amazing article on the social benefits of teasing. Read it here.

"In seeking to protect our children from bullying and aggression, we risk depriving them of a most remarkable form of social exchange. In teasing, we learn to use our voices, bodies and faces, and to read those of others — the raw materials of emotional intelligence and the moral imagination. We learn the wisdom of laughing at ourselves, and not taking the self too seriously. We learn boundaries between danger and safety, right and wrong, friend and foe, male and female, what is serious and what is not. We transform the many conflicts of social living into entertaining dramas. No kidding."