Threat Isn’t One Thing
Why a health scare and a climate crisis push your thinking in opposite directions.
Updated May 21, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Imagine a simple experiment. You ask two people to do exactly the same thing: Write four sentences about a future in which something has gone badly wrong. You tell the first person to write about climate change. You tell the second to write about a dangerous illness they might catch. The task is identical. Only the threat is different.
When you read what they wrote, the two texts do not feel alike. The climate text tends to be built from longer, connected sentences that reason step by step. The illness text is usually shorter and more emotional. It has more words like I and afraid , and fewer of the small words that link one idea to the next.
This is not just an impression, but the pattern we found in a study of 2,708 people that my colleagues and I published very recently in Applied Cognitive Psychology . And it does not fit the story that psychology has told about threat for a long time.
That story is simple: When people feel threatened, their thinking speeds up and becomes less careful. Slow, step-by-step reasoning gives way to quick, automatic reactions.
Past Research on How Threat Affects Thinking
There is real evidence behind this idea. Reminders of death, the threat of terrorism, and the pressure of scarcity have all been linked to less careful thinking. Mani and colleagues (2013) showed that worrying about money uses up mental resources that people would otherwise spend on other problems. Threat, the story says, makes us think worse.
The problem is that the research has never fully agreed with itself.
Terror Management Theory says that a reminder of death makes people hold on to their existing worldview more tightly (Greenberg et al., 1990). A different account says that threat pushes almost everyone toward more conservative attitudes (Jost et al., 2003). A third says the effect depends on the person: under threat, liberals begin to think more like conservatives (Nail et al., 2009).
And some findings fit none of these. After the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, attitudes toward immigration in Western Europe did not move (Finseraas & Listhaug, 2013). The 2011 attacks in Norway were even followed by warmer feelings toward immigrants (Jakobsson & Blom, 2014). For a field that speaks confidently about “the effect of threat,” this is a great deal of disagreement. One idea offers a way out of the confusion. Eadeh and Chang (2020) argued that threats are simply not all the same. A threat that one political side is seen to “own” moves people toward that side. A warning about the environment , for example, can move opinion to the left rather than the right.
If that is correct, then the problem was never the evidence. The problem was the word. “Threat” was being treated as one thing when it is clearly many.
Comparing the Effects of Different Types of Threats on Linguistic Styles
This is the idea my colleagues Mehmet Harma, Fırat Şeker, Burak Doğruyol, and I set out to test. We chose 11 different threats—among them climate change, financial scarcity, disease, war, a breakup, and terrorism—and studied them in a single preregistered experiment. Every threat was tested the same way, so that, for once, they could be compared directly. (See Figure 1 for a summary.)
We began with reasoning tasks: the kind of problems that threat is supposed to make harder. Here, the result was clear, and it surprised us. None of the 11 threats lowered people’s scores. By this familiar measure, nothing happened at all.
But the reasoning task was the wrong place to look. Before solving those problems, each person had written a few sentences about their threat. When we analyzed that writing, the 11 threats separated clearly.
Climate change and mass migration led to more analytical, structured language. Disease and financial scarcity did the opposite, producing language that was less structured and more emotional. Threat had not simply made thinking worse. It had reorganized thinking, and the direction depended on which threat the person faced.
This makes sense once we stop expecting threat to do only one thing. A distant, large-scale danger like climate change is something people can plan for and argue about, so it invites careful reasoning. A disease inside the body, or rent that cannot be paid this month, is immediate and personal, and it pulls thinking toward feeling and urgency.
The task was identical in every case. The threat was not, and the threat is what shaped the response.
The most important lesson is about how we measure the mind. None of this appeared in the reasoning scores. It appeared only in the language.
A test score gives you a single number. The way a person actually writes tells you much more. The sentences they build, how much emotion they show, whether they say I or we —all of this reveals how a threat is affecting them.
One detail stayed the same across almost every threat. Words about other people, about connection and belonging, remained central. Whatever the danger, people’s language reached toward others.
So when the world next feels threatening, the useful question is not simply “Am I stressed ?” It is “What kind of threat is this, and which way is it bending my thinking?” Money worries narrow attention to the immediate, and decisions narrow with them. A slower, larger worry may actually leave room for careful thought.
The single word “stress” hides all of this. Your own sentences do not. Read them closely, and they will tell you which threat you are really in.
Eadeh, F. R., & Chang, K. K. (2020). Can threat increase support for liberalism? New insights into the relationship between threat and political attitudes. Social Psychological and Personality Science , 11(1), 88–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550618815919
Finseraas, H., & Listhaug, O. (2013). It can happen here: The impact of the Mumbai terror attacks on public opinion in Western Europe. Public Choice , 156 (1), 213–28. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-011-9895-7
Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., Rosenblatt, A., Veeder, M., Kirkland, S., & Lyon, D. (1990). Evidence for terror management theory II: The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who threaten or bolster the cultural worldview. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 58(2), 308–318. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.58.2.308
Harma, M., Şeker, F., Doğruyol, B., & Yilmaz, O. (2026). Language speaks louder than performance: Linguistic indicators of cognitive processing across common threat scenarios. Applied Cognitive Psychology , 40(3), e70216. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.70216
Jakobsson, N., & Blom, S. (2014). Did the 2011 terror attacks in Norway change citizens’ attitudes toward immigrants? International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 26(4), 475–486. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edt036
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin , 129(3), 339–375. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.3.339
Mani, A., Mullainathan, S., Shafir, E., & Zhao, J. (2013). Poverty impedes cognitive function. Science, 341(6149), 976–980. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1238041
Nail, P. R., McGregor, I., Drinkwater, A. E., Steele, G. M., & Thompson, A. W. (2009). Threat causes liberals to think like conservatives. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , 45(4), 901–907. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2009.04.013
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Onurcan Yilmaz, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at Kadir Has University (Istanbul) and the director of the MINT Lab (Moral Intuitions Lab).
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