Perseus’s Shield

Detecting violent intent is a core goal of law enforcement and criminal justice systems alike. But in cases where threatening language is the sole evidence, the usual behavioral cues (e.g., stalking, buying a weapon) on which social perceivers rely to interpret a threatener’s intentions are unavailable. The present study examined 14 authentic threat texts, uncovering patterns such as a sensitivity to consensus reality by authors who proceeded to violence and a heightened hostility by those authors who did not. Framed by systemic functional linguistics and the folk concept of intentionality, it is argued that the correlation between the discovered language patterns and the real-world behavior of their authors is best explained by a “linked” reasoning process, where the decision about the desirability and feasibility of violence becomes an input to a subsequent decision-making process about whether to communicate these ideations in the form of a threat.