Just teasing: a conceptual analysis and empirical review.

Drawing on E. Goffman's concepts of face and strategic interaction, the authors define a tease as a playful provocation in which one person comments on something relevant to the target. This approach encompasses the diverse behaviors labeled teasing, clarifies previous ambiguities, differentiates teasing from related practices, and suggests how teasing can lead to hostile or affiliative outcomes. The authors then integrate studies of the content of teasing. Studies indicate that norm violations and conflict prompt teasing. With development, children tease in playful ways, particularly around the ages of 11 and 12 years, and understand and enjoy teasing more. Finally, consistent with hypotheses concerning contextual variation in face concerns, teasing is more frequent and hostile when initiated by high-status and familiar others and men, although gender differences are smaller than assumed. The authors conclude by discussing how teasing varies according to individual differences and culture. Teasing is central to human social life. People tease to socialize, flirt, resolve conflicts, and pass the time in imaginative and playful ways. With slight variations in utterance and display, teasing can lead to more disturbing ends, as when teasing humiliates or harasses. As prevalent as teasing is in everyday life, it is absent as a coherent topic in empirical psychology. The reasons for this absence are several. Teasing is often subsumed under, and at times conflated with, humor, play, irony, sarcasm, and bullying. Teasing, as we shall see, has not been adequately defined and therefore resists measurement and manipulation. Moreover, teasing is a relational process, ideally requiring the study of individuals in the stream of their spontaneous interactions. Our interest in this article is to provide theoretically derived answers to four questions and, in doing so, to synthesize extant literatures. What is teasing? When do people tease? How does teasing change with development? And how does teasing vary across contexts? We draw on the theorizing of scholars interested in how so-called face concerns—the concern for one's own and others' social esteem—influence language and social interaction (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Clark, 1996; Goffman, 1967). This theoretical tradition leads us to define teasing as an intentional provocation accompanied by playful markers that together comment on something of relevance to the target of the tease. This definition and the concepts of face and strategic interaction help differentiate teasing from related categories of behavior, such as