Does justice depend on “what the judge ate for breakfast”? That maxim captures the idea that judicial decisions have as much to do with psychological tendencies of judges, and political biases, as with legal reasoning.
Researchers studying parole decisions in Israel didn’t quite prove the old saw, but they came close. They demonstrated a remarkable link between when, during the course of a day, inmates appeared before a judge and how cases turned out. In short, if the jurist hadn’t taken a food break recently, the prisoner was in trouble.
The study looked at 1,112 rulings involving requests for parole, or changes of the terms of incarceration, presented to eight judges, over 50 days.
Each morning, the judges would hear roughly eight cases before taking a brief snack break. They’d come back to hear about a dozen more cases before lunch, then still more in the afternoon.
The odds of an inmate receiving a favorable decision started at 65%, first thing in the morning, then steadily dropped to roughly zero just before the snack break. Favorable rulings popped back up to 65% when the judge returned, then slid down to zero again just before lunch. The same pattern appeared post-lunch.*
The authors could find no other factors that might explain the pattern beyond the hearing’s timing; the severity of crimes committed by the inmates varied randomly throughout the day, for example.
The authors had no firsthand knowledge of the judges’ mood, but they commented that “executive function,” linked to self-control and abstract-reasoning ability, declines as people grow hungrier and more tired.
Source: “Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions,” Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pessoa, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (forthcoming)
*Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. The proportion of favorable results did drop to zero if the judge heard 12 cases before a break. If he or she heard only 8 before a break, however, the average chance of a favorable result was 25%. But the result remains astounding.