In research reported in the journal Law and Human Behavior, Brad Celestin and I used Bayesian methods to measure perceived severities of police actions. For each of about two dozen actions, we had lay people rate the action’s moral acceptability, appropriateness, punishability, and physical forcefulness. We regressed the ratings on the actions, simultaneously estimating latent scale values of the action severities.
Below is a stylized graph to show the idea. …