Agreement among judges on the severity of different morbidity states.

In order to scale their severity, different states of morbidity are presented to subjects of six professional groups. By comparing the obtained scale scores with those assigned by legal institutions, bias in the subjective judgments can be detected. The judgment process is found to fall under a psychophysical law, Stevens' power law. The ordering of the morbidity states forms a basis to investigate if the subjects are likely to agree on their judgments. It is found that the medical professional groups not only assign other relative values to severity states but also order them in a different way.