One standardized ontology for observable behavioral expression.
Official public-facing home of the CBL framework
Computational Behavioral Law
A measurement framework for how people express responses to authority, fairness, rules, and institutions.
CBL measures observable behavioral expression in text. It does not read minds, score individuals, predict behavior, or automate legal decision-making. It uses a standardized ontology of behavioral primitives to characterize how people express trust, legitimacy perceptions, fairness assessments, identity salience, and behavioral orientation across legal and non-legal contexts.
Designed for legal and non-legal authority environments.
Current claims are methodological and hypothesis-driven, not final findings.
What Is CBL
CBL measures observable behavioral expression, not internal mental states.
Computational Behavioral Law is a developing measurement methodology that captures how people express responses to authority, rules, and institutions through text-mediated operational proxies. It focuses on observable linguistic and behavioral expression through which people reveal trust, legitimacy perception, fairness assessment, identity salience, and related behavioral orientations.
Observable expression only
CBL does not claim to measure internal psychological states directly. It measures the observable expressions through which people reveal trust, legitimacy perceptions, fairness assessments, identity salience, and related behavioral orientations in legal and non-legal environments.
Designed for underrepresented communities
The framework is intended for multilingual applicability from the outset, with particular attention to linguistic communities underrepresented in existing behavioral measurement research.
The Problem
Comparable behavioral measurement remains fragmented across law, sociology, public administration, and organizational research.
Procedural fairness, institutional trust, legitimacy, and identity-based response are often studied with disconnected instruments. That fragmentation makes cross-domain comparison difficult and leaves institutions without one standardized language for observable behavioral measurement.
Disconnected instruments
Similar constructs are measured differently across adjacent research traditions.
Weak comparability
Cross-domain inference becomes difficult when behavioral constructs are not operationalized consistently.
One measurement language
CBL aims to provide standardized behavioral primitives for authority-sensitive expression.
Primitive Ontology
The framework is organized around ten behavioral primitives.
Each primitive has an operational definition, observable indicators, and conservative extraction rules. When insufficient evidence exists, extraction defaults to not observable.
Initial Affect
Pre-deliberative emotional orientation toward an event, decision, or authority.
Default: not observable when evidence is insufficient.Risk Perception
Expressed assessment of threat, harm, or negative consequence.
Default: not observable when evidence is insufficient.In-Group Authority Trust
Expressed trust in proximate authority figures associated with the speaker's in-group.
Default: not observable when evidence is insufficient.Out-Group Authority Trust
Expressed trust in identifiable authority figures outside the speaker's in-group.
Default: not observable when evidence is insufficient.Behavioral Orientation
Stated intention toward compliance, avoidance, defiance, mobilization, or inaction.
Default: not observable when evidence is insufficient.Belief Revision
Expressed change in prior beliefs or expectations in response to a situation.
Default: not observable when evidence is insufficient.Legitimacy Judgment
Normative stance on whether an action, rule, or decision is legitimate.
Default: not observable when evidence is insufficient.Identity Salience
Expressed intensity of group identification and in-group versus out-group framing.
Default: not observable when evidence is insufficient.Institutional Trust
Generalized trust in institutional functionality and reliability beyond a single actor.
Default: not observable when evidence is insufficient.Procedural Fairness
Assessment of fairness based on voice, neutrality, respect, and trustworthiness.
Default: not observable when evidence is insufficient.Scientific Context
CBL is informed by broader multi-domain measurement paradigms.
The framework does not claim to invent the general idea of integrating heterogeneous observations across domains. Instead, it explores whether standardized behavioral primitives can characterize responses to authority, fairness, legitimacy, and institutions across legal and non-legal environments.
Measurement, not hype
CBL is informed by emerging approaches that use multi-domain measurement, standardized observations, phenotypic-style measurement strategies, and heterogeneous data integration across complex environments.
Validation remains ongoing
Current claims concern framework design, observable behavioral expression, and testable hypotheses. Validation research is ongoing and findings should be interpreted accordingly.
Cross-Domain Isomorphism Hypothesis
Structurally comparable behavioral configurations may appear across different authority environments.
CBL proposes that a referee decision, a judge ruling, or a platform moderation action may elicit comparable behavioral configurations even when the surface contexts differ. This is a testable hypothesis, not an established finding.
A fan reaction, a citizen reaction, and a user reaction may all express the same underlying patterns of trust, legitimacy perception, identity salience, or behavioral orientation.
Current Validation Research
Pre-registered pilot validation is in progress.
Current work tests whether CBL primitive distributions can detect authority-sensitive behavioral structure across legal complaints, sports or officiating complaints, restaurant or service complaints, and product complaints.
CBL External Corpus Validation (H1)
The current project asks whether a common behavioral primitive ontology can detect authority-sensitive structure beyond simple negative sentiment.
Pilot stage
Validation is active, limited, and ongoing. No claims of definitive empirical confirmation are made here.
Application Domains
CBL is presented as a developing methodology with potential application domains only.
Legal contexts
Court processes, traffic enforcement, administrative systems, and legal complaints.
Sports communities
Authority response, officiating complaints, identity-driven reaction, and collective mobilization.
Digital governance and public participation
Platform moderation, civic discourse, policy feedback, and institutional response.
Ethical & Methodological Boundaries
CBL characterizes properties of text expressions. It does not assign behavioral scores to people.
- Measures observable text expressions and aggregate behavioral patterns
- Does not measure internal mental states, hidden intentions, future behavior, or personal worth
- Does not support social scoring, predictive policing, surveillance, automated adjudication, or individual risk scoring
- Uses conservative extraction, not observable defaults, anonymization, preregistration, and inter-rater validation
Personally identifiable information is not required for behavioral primitive extraction and should be removed whenever possible before analysis. CBL is designed to operate on behavioral expressions rather than personal identities.
About PriorLex
CBL is the methodology. PriorLex LLC provides institutional support for development, validation, and applied experimentation.
Methodology vs organization
PriorLex supports development, validation, and applied experimentation. Its applications include SundayPulse, Cimbom, AmedBarikat, and future research systems. These are use cases and research environments, not the methodology itself.