The perceived seriousness of crimes: inter-individual commonalities and differences

Abstract

The paper focuses on ratings of the perceived seriousness of crimes and how they can be explained in a testable scaling model (SOCID) that shows commonalities and differences among individuals. The model assumes that crimes are first represented on each person’s psychological map. This map can be described as a geometric space spanned by the crimes’ perceived attributes. When assessing the seriousness of crimes, the person positions him-/herself on this map by finding a point whose distances to the crime points express how much he/she is rejects the respective crimes. Using three representative German surveys on crime prevention, the SOCID model is positively tested for various predictions: (1) All persons in our surveys share the same psychological map of crimes; (2) a 2-dimensional map accurately describes the persons’ observed badness ratings; (3) the points representing the crimes form essentially linear manifolds on the maps; (4) the older and the more conservation-oriented a person, the more similar his/her distances to the crimes; (5) gender has no systematic effect on the distribution of person-points on the crimes’ maps.