Compelling Promises and Hollow Threats: Why You can Keep Someone to His Promise but Not to His Threat

This paper focuses on the differences in interpretation between promises and threats. We investigated to what extent uttering a conditional promise or threat implies an obligation for the speaker to carry out the reward or punishment mentioned in the consequent. Therefore, we presented the participants of the experiment with four promise contexts and four threat contexts. These were each time followed by six conditional sentences of which the antecedent remained the same and the consequent varied in credibility. The experiment provided us with interesting findings about the difference in interpretation between promises and threats: there appears to be a greater discrepancy between uttering and putting into effect the consequent of a conditional in the case of threats than in the case of promises.