Abstract: Various kinds of actors -- including individuals, groups, and states -- are commonly said to be provoked. Broadly defined as a norm-violating act that brings forth a response in an actor, provocation is a human phenomenon of wide interest in the basic sciences of human interaction, in politics, in the humanities, and in most types of art. So far, research disciplines such as psychology, political science, and art history offer mostly isolated discourses on provocation (for examples of isolated overviews from different social sciences, see Paris, 1998, Stepanov, 2008, Karwat, 2022). In this presentation, our focus is on elemental provocation processes, which may be components in more complex provocative undertakings.

Our starting point is that to be provokable in the human sense an actor needs to participate in the ongoing evaluative social construction processes that may affect their beliefs about themselves and others (i.e., situational standing and identity are at stake). We propose that how provocation-exchanges either repeat or update such beliefs constitute different types of provocation. With a simple classification scheme based on the belief states of the involved actors, we will try to abstract a handful of fundamental provocation types.

Variants of the classification scheme will be elaborated, with the aim of ultimately contributing toward a more manageable scope of elemental provocations. Some tentative expectations regarding different provocation trajectories, implied new research questions, and empirical strategies will be discussed.

N.B. The presentation represents work in progress. Thus I am going to present some initial ideas about how we might view provocations, and I expect to have a discussion about them. Because this is a new research topic for me, attached please find a popular text on provocation (regarding Dostoevsky but with broader implications) as background for the presentation. It was published in Swedish (Axess) so a translation into English is attached too.

Bio: Per Henrik Hedberg is an associate professor and research fellow at Södertörn University and Stockholm School of Economics, respectively, lecturing in cognition, social psychology, intercultural psychology, statistics, and organizational behavior/international business. Following PhDs in experimental psychology (Columbia University) and business administration (SSE), he was the Academic Director of SSE Russia for nearly a decade (closed in 2021). Since last year, together with Andrew Schenkel & Erik Wetter, he is teaching Ukrainian diplomats and civil servants negotiation for Ukraine’s EU accession process. Notable scientific discoveries include the first demonstration of spontaneous increase in non-depressed memory strength over time (Hedberg & Higgins, 2011); closer to economics and business, Hedberg (2021) proposed and demonstrated the hitherto strongest validated predictor of individual negotiation performance. Per's current research examines Russian, Swedish, English, and Chinese speaking individuals' orientations to strategic interaction. Related to the present topic, Per is co-editing a special issue on provocation processes for the American Behavioral Scientist.

Register for the seminar here.