Hungry judge effect
The hungry judge effect is a term originally coined to describe a data pattern that judges' verdicts are more lenient after a meal break. Since the original study, the term has morphed to encompass a stream of research concerned with implications of hunger on economic and social behavior.
It has been suggested that this may be an artifact of case scheduling.[1]
Original study
A study of the decisions of Israeli parole boards was made in 2011.[2] It found that the granting of parole was 65% at the start of a session but would drop to nearly zero before a meal break.[2] The authors suggested that mental depletion as a result of fatigue caused decisions to increasingly favour the status quo, while rest and replenishment then restored a willingness to make bold decisions. The paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has been cited many times – 1,380 times by 2021.[3]
Responses
Psychologist Daniël Lakens has argued that the size of the effect in the original study is impossibly large.[4] A later analysis and simulations suggested that at least part of the effect might arise from scheduling priorities – that cases with a lenient outcome required more time and so would not be scheduled in the time remaining before a break.[5]
More recent studies show that certain legal decisions can get more lenient with increasing case ordering, which might be caused by a direction-of-comparison mechanism rather than decision-makers' fatigue.[6]
Consequences
Interventions of AI and algorithms in the court such as COMPAS software are usually motivated by the hungry judge effect. However, some argue that the hungry judge effect is overstated in justifying the use of AI in law.[7]
Robert Sapolsky uses this as an example to argue we have lesser free will than we think in his book Determined.
Economic and social behavior during Ramadan
The hungry judge effect was thought to predict greater human kindness after the break of the Ramadan fast. However, the opposite has been observed in experimental studies.[8] Observant participants showed greater kindness while fasting and less so after breaking their fast. Thus, the hungry judge effect is situation specific and impacted by morality triggers.
References
- ^ Weinshall-Margel, Keren; Shapard, John (2011). "Overlooked factors in the analysis of parole decisions". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 108 (42): E833, author reply E834. Bibcode:2011PNAS..108E.833W. doi:10.1073/pnas.1110910108. PMC 3198355. PMID 21987788.
- ^ a b Shai Danziger; Jonathan Levav; Liora Avnaim-Pesso (26 April 2011), "Extraneous factors in judicial decisions", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (17): 6889–6892, Bibcode:2011PNAS..108.6889D, doi:10.1073/pnas.1018033108, PMC 3084045, PMID 21482790
- ^ Extraneous factors in judicial decisions, Google Scholar, retrieved 27 August 2021,
About 1,380 results
- ^ Lakens, Daniel (3 July 2017). "Impossibly hungry judges". The 20% Statistician. Retrieved 21 April 2024.
- ^ Andreas Glöckner (November 2016), "The irrational hungry judge effect revisited: Simulations reveal that the magnitude of the effect is overestimated", Judgment and Decision Making, 11 (6): 601–610, doi:10.1017/S1930297500004812, S2CID 19192291
- ^ Plonsky, Ori; Chen, Daniel L.; Netzer, Liat; Steiner, Talya; Feldman, Yuval (2023). "Motivational drivers for serial position effects: Evidence from high-stakes legal decisions". Journal of Applied Psychology. 108 (7): 1137–1156. doi:10.1037/apl0001064. PMID 36455017.
- ^ Chatziathanasiou, Konstantin (May 2022). "Beware the Lure of Narratives: "Hungry Judges" Should Not Motivate the Use of "Artificial Intelligence" in Law". German Law Journal. 23 (4): 452–464. doi:10.1017/glj.2022.32. ISSN 2071-8322. S2CID 249047713.
- ^ Ernan Haruvy, Christos Ioannou, & Farnoush Golshirazi (2018). The religious observance of ramadan and prosocial behavior. Economic Inquiry, 56(1), 226-237. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecin.12480