Estimating the perceived threat threshold for acting in self-defense

Abstract

Abstract We formulate the decision to engage in self-defense within a Bayesian framework and report an experiment assessing the influence of situational cues and individual difference variables on perceptions of threat and intentions to act in self-defense. US adult respondents (N = 235) read four ambiguous threat vignettes involving situations in which the respondent is alone in a high- or low-crime area and is approached by a male stranger exhibiting either high or low immediate threat cues. For each vignette, respondents indicated a probability that the stranger intends to harm and a binary intention to either engage in proactive self-defense or not. The extent to which manipulated proximal and distal cues influenced threat perception probabilities was moderated by both respondents’ gender and political orientation. Threat perception probabilities mediate the influence of both proximal and distal cues on the intention to engage in proactive self-defense. Even odds thresholds of perceived threat probability to engage in self-defense ranged from 0.62 to 0.65 across the four scenarios, suggesting that failing to react to an actual threat is perceived as two to three times more costly than that of mistaken self-defense.