Hypothesis: people eat a poor diet because their decision-making ability is most impaired right at the point where they are deciding what to eat next.
they grant about 65% after meal breaks, and about 10% right before breaks and at the end of the day
While the idea that judges are more lenient shortly after eating is plausible, this effect size does not pass sanity checking. I would like to see this reproduced. The judgments to be made should break down into some one-sided decisions and some borderline decisions, but these numbers imply not only that one-sided decisions are uncommon, but also that borderline decisions aren't influenced much by other things like the eloquence of the lawyers.
I agree the effects are dramatic and that replication would be ideal. But if you look at the study, it really does say what I said (actually, it drops close to 0%), and it seems like they control for severity of offense (which would hardly be time-of-day correlated anyhow). The N is over a thousand, with 8 different judges.
It wouldn't indicate that lawyer eloquence is irrelevant, only that lawyer eloquence is much less significant when the judge is hungry or tired. That actually isn't such a big stretch.
The true effect may be less noticeable than the effect observed in this study, but the study is nonetheless rather strong evidence that some meaningful effect exists. I bet there will be a lot of followups to this; it's rather staggering.
It wouldn't indicate that lawyer eloquence is irrelevant, only that lawyer eloquence is much less significant when the judge is hungry or tired. That actually isn't such a big stretch.
Or possibly that lawyers and judges meal schedules tend to be synchronized, and lawyer eloquence correlates with lawyer hunger. Which would not be too surprising, really, though arguably it's just as problematic as the interpretation it replaces.
One question worth considering is how parole hearings get scheduled in the first place.
If there's a general understanding among lawyers that their odds are adjusted even slightly based on judges meals, that might drive a systematic tendency to schedule the most compelling cases right after meals (to "put all of my wood behind one arrow," as a former boss used to put it., and the least compelling cases right before them.
The study states that no one in the profession they talked to (judges or lawyers) expected this bias. So such a deliberate scheduling explanation seems unlikely.
I don't know about Israel, but I do know that in American courts, cases are not heard in random order on a given day. It's very common that simple, quick matters are put first so that the attorneys can get out fast.
Presumably, a parole application is either contested by the prosecutor's office or uncontested. If it's uncontested, it's probably pretty quick. Just some perfunctory testimony from the convict and perhaps from the parole services office, a few questions from the judge, and that's that.
On the other hand, if the parole application is contested, one can expect more in the way of witnesses, cross-examination, and so forth.
It would be natural to put the contested applications towards the end of the morning and afternoon sessions.
Anyway, I am just speculating here. But it does seem suspicious that timing alone could make such a dramatic difference unless some other factor is at work.
In the paper, the authors spend a couple paragraphs considering the different biases that can be involved. Since this topic is outside my research area, I'm not allowing myself to spend time reviewing how thorough their analysis was.
Thus, completely independent of this particular paper, I just wanted to point out agreeably that such an observation (of a high probability of passing early in a session and lower probabilities later in a session) could come about naturally if the length of an application increases greatly if it is not going to be passed, even if the applications are ordered randomly. Suppose that a typical session is 3 hours and an application takes 5 minutes if it is going to pass and 2 hours if it is not going to pass. Then several passing applications can get through quickly at the beginning of a session, but most non-passing sessions would pass towards the end, or even right before a break if the judge insists on finishing the application before taking the break.
Beware the sometimes subtle trap of thinking that, since you have thought about a big decision/belief at seemingly random intervals for a whole week (month, year) now, you have perspective on the decision/belief from a representative variety of your states of mind. State-dependent memory, habits, priming &c. make this unlikely unless you were deliberately making an effort.
If you seriously believe that the majority of Americans believe that judges are relatively unbiased, you need to spend some time with a lower class of people. And I'm not talking about middle class white kids pretending to be rebels.
EVERY convict I know (with one exception, and I'm not sure about him, it's been 20 years since he was in jail) and everyone who has ever tried to argue a child custody case, lost a small claims case, or whatever thought the judge was personally and malevolently biased against them for all sorts of reasons ranging from their haircut to the phase of the moon.
It's really only the upper middle class and the rich who think that judges are mostly unbiased, although many do think it's for racial or cultural reasons, most of them just don't want to admit that they are guilty.
In another vein, most of us DO think about "big" questions at different times, this is why they are "big" questions--we don't wake up in the morning and in between the time we finish grinding the beans and taking the first drink of coffee decide to quit or job designing and printing t-shirts for underground punk bands, drop back into school and get a masters in busine...
EVERY convict I know ... and everyone who has ever tried to argue a child custody case, lost a small claims case, or whatever thought the judge was personally and malevolently biased against them...
Well, there could be a bit of selection bias there. The people who were acquitted of criminal charges, who were awarded sole custody of their kids, and who won their small claims cases might have different views.
The people who were acquitted of criminal charges, who were awarded sole custody of their kids, and who won their small claims cases might have different views.
I was once ticketed for speeding. (The circumstances were as follows: I was driving several of my friends home after a party -- I was as always completely sober -- and had a full car. After almost entirely highway driving, I pulled out of an on-ramp, waited at a red light, turned red [because there was no turn on red], and then almost immediately turned again because that's where my first delivery-couple lived at. As I was turning that second time police lights came on behind me. The officer spent five minutes trying to get me to admit to being under the influence in some way. After it became painfully clear I wasn't, he quickly wrote me up a ticket for going twenty over, claiming he had 'paced' me, and that he had to immediately run off to some other emergency.) Naturally for this story to be relevant here, I contested the ticket. I had each of my friends sign a notarized letter stating that they personally recall me turning on the cruise-control of my car at a non-speeding velocity.
The officer didn't show up, and so...
I have observed and used a similar effect in myself. I do my most difficult studying right after eating, then use the long, almost flat plateau afterwards for studying or decision making that requires a high degree of sustained concentration, and try to use the tail for routine chores and R&R. The food doesn't make a lot of difference, the peak seems slightly higher after a high carb snack, but the same effect was present and only a bit weaker when I was eating an almost zero-carb (meat only) diet. Though a sudden change in diet can create unusual effects; for example a really high fiber meal (bean soup) can have unpredictable effects when I haven't been eating a lot of fiber recently.
..there is a rather cynical discipline called legal realism that says the law is really based on quirks of individual psychology, "what the judge had for breakfast,"...
In common law countries, sentencing decisions are made by trial judges. But the decisions of trial judges don't count as "precedent," and therefore are not "the law." Case law -- binding precedent -- is made up of the published decisions of appeals courts. Trial judges often have to make their decisions in real time, right there at the trial in front of ev...
I apparently can't access the article at all (I can't see any links for athens/shibboleth), so I can't tell, but does the paper make it clear that the scheduling of cases is purely at random? That could have a huge effect on bias, as could other factors such as which lawyers are around for which cases excetera.
In addition of course, this is a nonrandom sample of some judges in Isreal. Generalising to assume that one will make different decisions on important cases depending on when one has eaten is probably not a good idea. That said, its probably worth thinking about at least if your decision is important, but thats actually probably more to do if one is in a good/bad mood.
Or were judges being too nice? We know there was bias, but we still don't know when bias occurred.
I feel the need to point out that the observation does not necessarily result in a bias. We literally know nothing about the legal system's arrangments for parolees here other than this single data point.
It could be, for example, that there is an understanding that the review boards arrange cases before judges based on the boards' estimate of the potential parolee's worthiness of release; with the 'worst offenders' being later in a giving hearing bracket. T...
Since I first read about this study, I have tried to move requests I make of strangers and authority figures to 1 PM when possible. Unfortunately I have not collected enough data to tell how effective this is.
The Economist reported on the Israeli study too:
http://www.economist.com/node/18557594
The article makes an argument which I find persuasive: that it's not about food as much as it's about difficult decisions tiring the brain. When the brain is tired, it resorts to the easy and safe option.
Check out the Economist article for more.
It turns out that legal realism is totally wrong. It's not what the judge had for breakfast. It's how recently the judge had breakfast.
Was that part of the study? Did they collect information about what the judges consumed for their meal? If it is, in fact, the meal that is important and not time since having a break then it would be somewhat surprising if what they ate was not an important factor. A meal higher in protein and fat has a nutritional impact over a far larger time period than a meal high in refined carbohydrates.
No, the study did not address the effect of dietary choices, partly because that would be really, really, really hard to do. Chalk that statement up to artistic license.
Just a side note: there is growing consensus in the neuroscience community that certain activity, foremost among them self-control (rational control of emotions, inhibitive projections from the prefrontal cortex downward), are highly dependent on the blood glucose level.
In other words, you don't eat, your blood glucose goes down, you are less able to be unbiased and detached. Also, it would seem, the short memory suffers, so you are able to keep fewer things in mind for parallel consideration. All of this adds up to an increase in irritability, more impul...
For particularly important decisions, consider contemplating them at different times, if you can. Think about one thing Monday morning, then Wednesday afternoon, then Saturday evening, going only to the point of getting an overall feel for an answer, and not to the point of really making a solid conclusion.
This seems congruent with the folk idea of "sleeping on" difficult or particularly important decisions rather than coming to a decision on the spot, and with the legal practice of having "cooling off periods" after a purchase is made or a contract is signed, during which one party can void the agreement.
It strikes me that all the really effective ways of combating subjective bias involve bringing in groups of people, whether it is democratic votes, the communitarianism of science, or juries. It looks like having a single judge deciding a sentence is a loophole to be plugged.
There are few places where society values rational, objective decision making as much as it values it in judges. While there is a rather cynical discipline called legal realism that says the law is really based on quirks of individual psychology, "what the judge had for breakfast," there's a broad social belief that the decision of judges are unbiased. And where they aren't unbiased, they're biased for Big, Important, Bad reasons, like racism or classism or politics.
It turns out that legal realism is totally wrong. It's not what the judge had for breakfast. It's how recently the judge had breakfast. A a new study (media coverage) on Israeli judges shows that, when making parole decisions, they grant about 65% after meal breaks, and almost all the way down to 0% right before breaks and at the end of the day (i.e. as far from the last break as possible). There's a relatively linear decline between the two points.
Think about this for a moment. A tremendously important decision, determining whether a person will go free or spend years in jail, appears to be substantially determined by an arbitrary factor. Also, note that we don't know if it's the lack of food, the anticipation of a break, or some other factor that is responsible for this. More interestingly, we don't know where the optimal result occurred. It's probably not the near 0% at the end of each work period. But is it the post-break high of 65%? Or were judges being too nice? We know there was bias, but we still don't know when bias occurred.
There are at least two lessons from this. The little, obvious one is to be aware of one's own physical limitations. Avoid making big decisions when tired or hungry - though this doesn't mean you should try to make decisions right after eating. For particularly important decisions, consider contemplating them at different times, if you can. Think about one thing Monday morning, then Wednesday afternoon, then Saturday evening, going only to the point of getting an overall feel for an answer, and not to the point of really making a solid conclusion. Take notes, and then compare them. This may not work perfectly, but it may help you realize inconsistencies, which could help. For big questions, the wisdom of crowds may be helpful - unless it's been a while since most of the crowd had breakfast.
The bigger lesson is one of humility. This provides rather stark evidence that our decisions are not under our control to the extent we believe. We can be influenced by factors we don't even suspect. Even knowing we have been biased, we may still be unable to identify what the correct answer was. While using formal rules and logic may be one of the best approaches to minimizing such errors, even formal rules can fail when applied by biased agents. The biggest, most condemnable biases - like racism - are in some ways less dangerous, because we know we need to look out for them. It's the bias you don't even suspect that can get you. The authors of the study think they basically got lucky with these results - if the effect had been to make decisions arbitrary rather than to increase rejections, this would not have shown up.
When those charged with making impartial decisions that control people's lives are subject to arbitrary forces they never suspected, it shows how important it is and much more we can do to be less wrong.