Individuals and Society

This chapter examines threats and responses to threats as they play themselves out in human interactions. One of the significant topics here is crime and punishment—notably, how criminal statutes seek to prevent crime by threatening criminals with punishment sufficient to provide an effective deterrent. There is a long and fascinating history of such efforts, with very little success. This leads to a look at the death penalty in particular and whether it has been effective in preventing capital crimes. The chapter also assesses how people turn to religion when under threat, as well as how religions have often threatened their adherents with after-death retribution for sin, which has long influenced much human anxiety and, in some cases, compliance. Moreover, the chapter reflects on the menace of death plus threats involved in the American gun culture, and race-based and economic anxieties driving the rise of right-wing national populism.

The Natural World

This chapter examines how threats, counterthreats, warnings, feints, and deceptions are found throughout the natural world, in the daily lives of animals and even plants. Indeed, these can be seen in plants with thorns and poisons, as well as in animals growling, roaring, baring teeth, showing and exaggerating their weapons (or pretending to have weapons), misrepresenting their ferocity, puffing themselves up, and generally seeking to intimidate their rivals or potential predators. The chapter then considers the role of honesty versus deception: the evolution of warning coloration, whereby brightly colored poison arrow frogs, for example, inform would-be predators that eating them would be a bad idea; and mimicry, in which animals who are not themselves especially dangerous resemble others that are harmful to their predators and thus gain protection via the “empty threat” the former conveys. This, in turn, speaks to the intriguing question of whether a given threat is real or fake, honest or dishonest, and what difference—if any—this makes. The chapter also explains the hawk–dove model of the variations of animal threat, and looks at vocal threats and animal eavesdropping.

International Affairs

This chapter explores how the use of military threats—that is, deterrence—has operated between and among nations. It begins with a brief history of conventional deterrence aimed at preventing wars by threatening either that an initial attack will fail to gain its objective (deterrence by denial) or that an attacker will be sufficiently punished so as to regret the initial action and thus prevent such an attack in the first place (deterrence by punishment). This leads to the self-serving phenomenon of bureaucratic “threat inflation” and then to the most consequential uses and abuses of threats: nuclear deterrence. The chapter then discusses how nuclear deterrence is supposed to work and whether it has in fact worked. It also provides a critical analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of nuclear deterrence.

A Nonthreatening Start

This chapter provides an overview of threats. Threats are ubiquitous; they are so encompassing that they often go unnoticed. Although people are especially aware of explicit threats, other threats are often hidden, leaving most of the interpersonal ones implicit and therefore psychologically fraught. Warnings, in contrast, can be impersonal and not necessarily conveyed by an individual. But sometimes, threats and warnings are indistinguishable. This book begins by going through the biology of threats as conveyed and received by animals, followed by a variety of socially mediated threats intended to prevent crime, along with such consequential threats as hellfire and brimstone, personal death, and gun violence and the rise of right-wing national populism, and culminates in a critical look at nuclear deterrence—the premier manifestation of threat at the international level. Of particular note is how responses to threats often become counterproductive: hardly at all in the case of animals, occasionally in the personal and social realm, and then overwhelmingly when it comes to nuclear deterrence.