We compare people’s intuitive judgments about how the self and
others respond to threat. We propose that people hold a
self-enhancing belief in “threat immunity,” i.e., they see
themselves as more secure than other people in the face of
threat. In Study one, people assumed that they threatened others
more than others threatened them. In Study two, people on
project teams estimated that both they and their teammates
provoked roughly equal levels of threat in others, although they
experienced less threat than did other people. Study three
experimentally manipulated threat perceptions in an interactive
context and revealed that when people held self-enhancing threat
appraisals, those with whom they interacted experienced lower
satisfaction with the outcome and relationship. Finally, Study
four demonstrated that, as compared to people who affirmed
themselves and thus focused on the self, people who affirmed
another person displayed lower threat immunity. The
self-enhancing nature of these threat appraisals reveals how
competition and envy emerge in organizations—or at least, how
people imagine they emerge.
