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Psychohistorian comments on The Bias You Didn't Expect - Less Wrong
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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.
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.