The irrational hungry judge effect revisited

I believe the original studies were shown to be faulty because they didn’t account for the fact that the cases were ordered. Less severe cases were seen first, which meant the more severe cases (ie those with more severe penalties) were shown later.

“Danziger etal. rely crucially on the assumption that the order of the cases is random and, thus, exogenous to the decision-making process. This assumption has been forcefully challenged. For a short and very critical reply in PNAS, Keren Weinshall-Margel and John Shapard analyzed the data of the original study—as well as other self-collected data—and conducted additional interviews with the court personnel involved.Footnote 51 They point out that the order of the cases is not random: The panel tries to deal with all cases from one prison before a break, before then moving to the cases of the next prison after a break. Most importantly, though, requests from prisoners who are not represented by a lawyer are typically dealt with at the end of each session. So, prisoners without legal representation are less likely to receive a favorable decision compared to those with legal representation.Footnote 52 Additionally, lawyers often represent several inmates and decide on the order in which the cases are presented—it might well be possible that they start with the strongest cases”

[1] Chatziathanasiou, K., 2022. Beware the lure of narratives:“hungry judges” should not motivate the use of “artificial intelligence” in law. German Law Journal, 23(4), pp.452-464.

This is fascinating.

For those unfamiliar, the original study found that judges were kinder in their decisions right after lunch, and harshest right before. (I’m dramatically oversimplifying, but that’s the bit folks usually cite.)

This study contests the strength of that finding by showing that positive rulings take longer, and that you can fit more simple negative rulings in just before a break (negative rulings are denials of parole, if you’re wondering why they are faster). Judges don’t want to start complex cases that are more likely to be favorable just before break. (Again, dramatically simplifying. The article has more.)

I have cited the original study countless times, and this injects a lot more nuance for me. I’m glad it was revisited.

Related:

Do judges give out tougher sentences when hungry? A study too good to be true - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35491060 - April 2023 (202 comments)

Impossibly Hungry Judges - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22020716 - Jan 2020 (1 comment)

Rebuttal to hungry judges give harsher sentences - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19958435 - May 2019 (1 comment)

Impossibly Hungry Judges (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18112378 - Oct 2018 (58 comments)

Impossibly Hungry Judges - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14701328 - July 2017 (70 comments)

Do hungry judges give harsher sentences? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2438189 - April 2011 (1 comment)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Statistics for stuff that has unequal length is tricky. Reminds me of the days there I did packet sampling on the LAN and as the length distribution is bimodal statistical math using means as assumption yielded misleading results.

Odd that nobody cites Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock":

  The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
  And wretches hang that jury-men may dine;

(https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/rape-lock-canto-3)

Interesting, didn't see this before. Now I am curious about addicted judge effect (e.g. smoking) since I witnessed weird things semi-similar to this, but for smoking.

How much of the current failure to repliacte could be attributed to the subjects undee observation being aware of the phenomenon and actively compensating?

Study finds that when there's a time limit, even a rational judge would try the case faster, and there would be a tendency towards unfavorable ruling.

Since lunchtime (and presumably end of work day) are such time limits, we see a drop in favorable rulings as lunchtime approaches, and a restoration in favorable rulings right after lunchtime.

And yet, the study, curiously, says, "the analyses by DLA do not provide conclusive evidence for the hypothesis that extraneous factors influence legal rulings". What is lunchtime and end of work day as not extraneous factors?

Note: the above only explains a part of the original finding. And the study admits that there are definitely more factors at play.

I have not been scheduling any meetings before lunch for years after I read the original study. oops

It would be interesting to see comparison where the default outcome is the opposite.

The prisoner is in prison and will continue to be in prison.

So might the outcome be different if the prisoner was doing to be set free unless judges argued why he was still going to be in prisoned.

It's probably way complicated though.

When was the last time a judge got fired for bad perforomance or being biased. Funny how judges somehow never face consequences of doing their jobs really poorly. They'll grant immunity for themselves. It's like a mafia...protect their own.

This day and age if a social/psych “paper” defies common sense it should just be ignored. Pushing these “findings” as science should be considered malpractice.

Could this not also be evidence for bias?

A judge scheduling longer hearings for cases with good outcomes suggests they've already made up their mind.

As someone said in an article about detecting bullshit science research, if such an effect were true, every day at noon tragedies and accidents would happen all over the world, and we would live in a different world where work close to lunch was illegal and so on, just like we forbid work under alcohol.

Interesting to think that in hunger evolution chose to increase the noise (irrationality) in our system, and that actually worked to make us more likely to survive (*in aggregate, statistically).

I guess the pithy aphorism: fortune favors the brave. Make a decision, even in limited information, you'll be better off than if you didn't.

Strange confirmation of the nature of reality from the human/experiment computation that is evolution. Hahaha! :)

I tell this to everyone: be wary of hypotheses and results that are very appealing.

In sum, the effect is explained by scheduling easy-to-judge cases to the time limited AM session, and the complex cases to the longer PM session.

So you're saying that another pop-sci psychology result turned out to be fundamentally flawed? I never would have guessed!

Anyway, I'll keep citing it as if it was legit, and be smug about it.

We should replace judges with LLM AIs. Even the current models can easily beat human judges.