Psychophysical measurement of the judged seriousness of crimes and severity of punishments

Abstract

Ratio scaling techniques of magnitude estimation and cross-modality matching were used to establish psychological scales of the seriousness of 22 crimes and the severity of then-associated punishments. The judged seriousness of crimes and judged severity of punishments were related to the physical duration of punishment by the same nonlinear function. Judged seriousness of crimes and severity of punishments were both power functions with an exponent of .5 of the duration of prison term. The results suggest that, in most cases, the punishment fits the crime when both are expressed in psychological units. © 1982, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.