Assessing threats of violence: Professional skill or common sense?

Abstract

When faced with threats of violence, it is of great importance to assess the risk for actual harm to occur. Over the last decades, this task has developed into a domain of its own and professionals have specialised in threat assessment. However, it is yet unknown whether professional experience affects the quality of threat assessments. The present study examined how threat assessment professionals (N = 44), university students (N = 44), and laypersons (N = 45) assessed the risk for violence in three fictitious cases. The assessments (i.e., assigning risk values to different pieces of information) were found to be strikingly similar across the three groups.Yet, professionals agreed more with one another on their assessments, and professionals identified more relevant (empirically supported) threat cues when given the opportunity to request additional information. These results suggest that threat assessment professionals know better than nonprofessionals what information to look for, and hence, they may contribute most in the process of gathering information to clarify the threat. Such knowledge can help to optimise the use of expertise, which may improve the quality of threat assessments. The current findings can be of value to those who consult threat assessment professionals, as well as to the professionals themselves.

A survey of risk and threat assessors: Processes, skills, and characteristics in terrorism risk assessment.

“…The findings indicate experienced assessors did not always outperform inexperienced assessors but were more consistent across cases. This echoes Geurts, Granhag, Ask, and Vrij's (2017) findings in the field of violence risk assessment. They found that while professional assessors did not outperform laypersons, they showed higher agreement with each other, and attended to more relevant cues.…”

“…It is also important to note that while these findings are indicative of the experiences and opinions of professional threat and risk assessors, these may not necessarily reflect the most effective or desirable training, experience, or characteristics for terrorism risk assessment. Indeed, as indicated by previous research, experience does not necessarily lead to more accurate judgments (Geurts et al, 2017;Powis et al, 2019). Additionally, given that the participants used in the sample were professional threat assessors themselves, it is possible that they emphasized their own experience, training, and characteristics, which may not provide objective insights.…”