Seriousness of Offenses

This experimental study, which was partly a replication of two previous studies in Canada and the United States, had a group of Norwegian students judge the seriousness of a set of offenses based on the magnitude estimation technique of psychophysics. Although it appeared that a considerable degree of consensus regarding the rank ordering of offense seriousness extended across the social and cultural differences between the three subject populations, some clear differences did emerge. In general, any change in the judgment of offense seriousness by the Norwegian subjects exceeded the corresponding changes perceived by the Canadian and the U.S. subjects.