Threat perception - the conscious or unconscious estimation that something or someone is dangerous - is a basic mental faculty. Political science has long acknowledged that perceived danger can motivate politically relevant behavior and attitudes. But existing theories only partially integrate findings from biology and cognitive science regarding the processing of danger in the mind and brain. The result is an incomplete, and sometimes misleading, picture of the relationship between threat perception and political behavior.
Across several papers and a book project, I investigate a single, over-arching question: why do individuals prefer some policies over others for dealing with a particular danger that concerns them?
To answer this question I develop and test a theory of the cognitive processes that are engaged when individuals are confronted with potential dangers. The result is Threat-Heuristic Theory (THT), a theory that links the way in which dangers are mentally processed to the preferences individuals have for mitigating them, including preferences for coordinated responses in the form of specific public policies. A discussion of the theory can be found here.
In brief, I leverage the cognitive science literature on threat perception to argue that people are concerned with avoiding three broad kinds of harm including: physical harm (from human and non-human factors), loss of material and non-material assets, and literal and imagined contamination. I show that the placement of potential dangers along each of these dimensions (threat classification) is subjective. I also demonstrate that some issues, including immigration, climate change and fundamentalism, constitute complex dangers, because they are perceived as posing more than one kind of potential harm. I argue that the same general behavioral strategies that individuals employ to mitigate each kind of harm for themselves will have analogues in their preferences for mitigating society-scale harms. Thus, I argue that an individual’s policy preferences for how a given danger should be mitigated can be predicted if threat classification of that danger is known.
I explore the theory’s utility and predictions across several populations and use cases.
Citizens
In the working paper “Threat Perception and Citizen Preferences for Security”, I introduce and test Threat-Heuristic Theory across three survey experiments in US-based adults. I consider in particular the theory’s predictions regarding preferences for forms of immigration restriction. I also examine the theory’s general mechanics in an experiment involving fictional dangers.
In ongoing work with Rebecca Saxe, I also investigate the neural correlates of threat perception. We consider the relationship between explicit question responses, neural representations, and policy preferences in a sample of US-based adults. Many of our group fmri maps are available on Neurovault.
Finally, I consider several second-order implications of the theory across several paper projects. These include: the (in)ability to accurately take the perspective of those who are concerned by dangers that seem unimportant to oneself; the (un)importance of new information and misinformation corrections for self-reported threat perception; and the mechanisms by which threat perception is acquired.
foreign policY Makers
In my book project, Seeking Security: Threat Perception and Policy-Making in a Dangerous World, I extend Threat-Heuristic Theory to the domain of elite decision making. I argue - consistent with a long tradition in the analysis of foreign policy - that cognitive mechanisms identified in experiments within the general public can apply equally to the individuals engaged in policy-making under certain conditions.
I focus on two groups of policy makers faced with developing national security strategies in response to relatively new threats: (1) early “Cold Warriors” and (2) key officials in the George W. Bush Administration following the events of September 11, 2001.
In the first two empirical chapters, I consider the theory’s predictions for the small set of policy makers engaged in developing America’s response to communism during the early Cold War (1946-1953). I use an original corpus of Cold War documents collected from six archives to investigate quantitatively and qualitatively how policy makers classified communism as a threat to American security. I use those measures of threat classification to generate predictions of individual-level preferences for specific elements of the national security strategy. I match those predictions to actual policy endorsements that occurred later in the period.
In the second case study, I consider the George W. Bush Administration’s response to the events of September 11, 2001 and the decision for preventive war in Iraq (and not Iran or North Korea). Given the limited access to documents, I focus on the President and his closest advisors using speech transcripts, text analysis, and interviews.