Defensive attack is evaluated as safer than escape under social threat

Accurately evaluating safety is essential for adaptive functioning. Safety estimation involves dynamic integration of both external threat and self-relevant defensive strategies. Previous research focuses on escape behavior in response to predatory threat, linking defensive strategies to temporal and spatial features of threat. Yet, little is known about how different defensive strategies are perceived when facing conspecific threat, which is more ecologically valid. Using a novel Safety Estimation Task, we examined how humans (N = 117, MAge = 19.3; SDAge = 2.6 years) evaluate and update safety perceptions based on defensive escape and attack cues relative to social threats. Our findings reveal that temporal order of threat and defensive cues differentially impacts how safety is evaluated. Participants demonstrated a recency effect when threat cues were presented before defensive cues and a primacy effect when defensive cues were presented before threat cues. Additionally, defensive cues were more heavily weighted in participants’ overall safety evaluation. Defensive attack was consistently evaluated as safer and elicited faster reaction times compared to defensive escape. These results advance understanding of how social threat is integrated with self-relevant defensive information to evaluate safety.