How food-breaks sway the decisions of judges

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/11/justice-is-served-but-more-so-after-lunch-how-food-breaks-sway-the-decisions-of-judges/

by robg • 15 years ago

120 29 15 years ago

blogs.discovermagazine.com

markstansbury2• 15 years ago

Legal realism is so fantastically obvious as this study easily shows.

The law is what judges do. So your lawyer had better know how to "manipulate" the judge.

lionhearted2• 15 years ago

This is true and obvious to some extent, but there's some real downsides to the legal realism movement. Legal realism starts off with a correct premise - that judges are flawed and human like the rest of us - but some people go further and come to the conclusion that, thus, no justice is possible and we should just game the system as much as possible.

It's an absolute fact that the American legal code has become more much more bloated, and in my opinion, more haphazard, disorganized, and prone to severe contradiction following legal realism becoming a popular philosophy.

It's immediately obviously true in its premise, but some of the conclusions following from legal realism seem to make the justice system worse.

tghw• 15 years ago

To be fair, most legal codes become much more bloated over time. You can hardly blame the legal realism movement for this correlation.

yuhong• 15 years ago

Yea, just because judges are not perfect is no excuse to deliberately game the system.

markstansbury2• 15 years ago

To be clear, I wasn't really suggesting that one should game the system, hence the scare quotes. But a competent lawyer should, in my view, respect the fact that judges are human and respond just like other humans. That means paying attention to little details like dress, demeanor, font, grammar, and all the other elements of presentation that every marketer knows but few lawyers understand.

On a deeper level there are tactics like angling your argument to the judge's world view. (This makes judicial panels all the more important.)

jpwagner• 15 years ago

Is there no method to the ordering?

If the breaks are pretty regular, wouldn't you want to hear more simplified (clear-cut?) cases immediately after a break and more complex ones when more alert?

JacobAldridge• 15 years ago

I would imagine simplified / clear-cut would skew as much (or more) towards non-parole than to a favourable parole decision.

anigbrowl2• 15 years ago

According to the article...

It’s not possible that someone ordered the cases in a special way. The judges know nothing about upcoming cases ahead of time, so they can’t decide to take a break in the knowledge that an easy positive case is coming up. They also have control over when they set their breaks, so prison staff cannot predictably schedule the hearings in order of ease. And Danziger showed that the judges weren’t any more likely to take a break after particularly difficult cases or severe crimes.

I'm not inclined to purchase the paper, but I would like to see a better explanation of the mechanics of Israeli prison parole hearings before jumping to conclusions.

rprasad• 15 years ago

The big flaw in this study is that while the judges may not know anything about the cases coming up, their clerks do and the clerks are the ones who actually determine the schedule.

Afternoon cases are almost always easier cases because afternoons are largely reserved for actual work: trial/pre-trial hearings, legal research, or paperwork generated by the morning workload. Thus, the clerks always schedule the easiest cases for the afternoon to minimize interference with the important stuff.

davidtgoldblatt• 15 years ago

The paper addresses this. To summarize

- The judges don't know the order of upcoming cases, but do pick when they're going to get food breaks. When they take these breaks shows considerable variation.

- Scheduling usually happens based on the ordering the attorneys arrive, and the attorneys don't express any conscious choice to try to game their arrival time.

- The paper also looks at what is likely to make a prisoner get paroled (e.g. type of crime, recidivism, etc.), and the cases that, without considering the effects of the breaks, are likely to result in parole do not seem to be clustered throughout the day.

The relevant passage:

A key aspect for interpreting the association between the ordinal position of a case and parole decisions is whether an unobserved factor determines case order in such a way that yields the pattern of results we obtain. For instance, if prisoners without a rehabilitation program or recidivists were somehow more likely to appear before a food break, we would naturally find a greater proportion of rejections occurring before the food break as well. A number of procedural factors preclude this possibility.

First and most critically, the judge both determines when the break will occur during the course of the day’s proceedings and is unaware of the details of the upcoming cases. Thus, the judge cannot decide when to take a break based on information related to the nature of the upcoming cases. So, in the example above, a judge cannot decide to take a break because he or she knows that prisoners after the break will have no previous incarceration record. Relatedly, the type of case (e.g., severity of the crime) that the judge had just ruled on exerted no significant effect on the likelihood of taking a break (Table S15). Furthermore, the large variability in break start times and durations attests to the fact that their occurrence would be nearly impossible to predict by any of the prison staff involved in the parole proceedings.

Second, the ordinal position of cases is, with rare exception, determined by the arrival time of the prisoner’s attorney. The attorneys are sequestered in a room where they are unable to view the proceedings of the board and, therefore, are unaware of any of the rulings of the judge, how many prisoners preceded their client’s case, or when and whether the food break occurred (after the board’s deliberations, attorneys exit through a different door). Thus, by design they cannot learn about the advantage of appearing after a break. Indeed, a survey administered to a sample of these attorneys after the primary data collection period indicated that they were unaware of the effect of ordinal position on rulings (see SI Materials and Methods, S2 for details). A similar survey administered to parole board members (judges, criminologists, and social workers) revealed the same results (see SI Materials and Methods, S3 for details).

Because of the factors discussed above, we did not expect significant correlations between ordinal position within either the day or the session and the control variables in our data (SI Materials and Methods, S4 and Table S16). Consistent with our expectations, there does not appear to be a deliberate ordering based on the characteristics of the prisoners (Fig. 3 A–D and SI Materials and Methods, S4); certainly there appears to be no effect of a food break on the type of prisoner appearing before the judge. Note that although there was a slight but significant correlation between recidivism and ordinal position in the day, this correlation was not significant within a decision session, i.e., between breaks. Thus, it cannot explain the spikes in favorable decisions after breaks.

DufusM• 15 years ago

To combat these kind of issues, maybe the law should move to some kind of a majority of three decisions, each hearing being random in all possible senses.

cpeterso• 15 years ago

Or we could use tele-judge technology so all defendants can get a hearing with an alert, well-fed judge from another timezone. (I'm only half joking.) This could also be a solution for load-balancing courts among different regions (though the laws may be regional differences).

khafra• 15 years ago

Except that would take three times as many judges; and if you had that many they could just take a break after every case.

shasta• 15 years ago

"The graph is dramatic."

No, that graph is incredible. Literally unbelievable. 70% accepted in the morning to down below 10% before snack? Either this data is BS or there's some hidden variable here.

T-hawk• 15 years ago

The comments on the original article do suggest another variable. The schedule may not be randomly arranged. The judges or the court clerks could actively arrange for easy cases earlier and more diffficult or complicated cases later. IOW, the variables may not be independent.

Also it's worth pointing out that this was a study on Israeli judges. American legal precedents and opinions and scheduling norms may not apply.

boredguy8• 15 years ago

"It’s not possible that someone ordered the cases in a special way. The judges know nothing about upcoming cases ahead of time, so they can’t decide to take a break in the knowledge that an easy positive case is coming up. They also have control over when they set their breaks, so prison staff cannot predictably schedule the hearings in order of ease."

chubot• 15 years ago

Exactly what I thought. The effect is way too big -- if it were that big, convicts would have caught on by now :)

splat• 15 years ago

I'm curious if the difference is due more to the food or to the break. Would taking a break without eating have a similar effect?

a-priori• 15 years ago

My theory is that it's more about the judge's blood sugar than about the break. Here's a Science Daily post about one documented case of blood sugar affecting decision-making:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100125173444.ht...

nooneelse• 15 years ago

If you didn't like the judge assigned to your case, and could pull together this kind data on their past decisions, would that be enough to argue for a different judge?

Or perhaps mandate that they eat a snack bar every so often.

jws• 15 years ago

To repeat myself from the previous time this study was posted:

The work itself is behind a paywall, but you can read some of the supporting material at http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2011/03/30/1018033108.DCSu... to get an idea.

I found the giant line graph problematic because of the hand waving they did to normalize when the breaks occurred during the day. It also disturbs me to see such large, high frequency variation in a line that is averaging a large number of events without explanation.

The dataset certainly begs for a better analysis. For instance, from the supporting material, is there really a judge (the 'X' marker) the never granted parole to the last three people before his morning snack, but granted 70% for the first three of the day on average? All year, for a significant number of cases? Did no one notice that the people before snack time were not getting due process?

jberryman• 15 years ago

Nice article. I would love to see similar data for orchestral auditions. It's common wisdom that it is best to play when the committee is fresh from a break but I'll bet the data would show that that is dramatically the case, since as with parol hearings, rejecting an auditionee would be the default choice.

flashingleds• 15 years ago

Some vertical error bars would have been helpful on that plot, but having read the original article (from behind the pay wall) I'm pretty satisfied that they thought about all the obvious problems being discussed in these comments. I am a practicing experimental scientist but with minimal knowledge of statistics, so factor that into whatever I say here.

They point out that a negative ruling ("no" or "almost - come back next time") is much easier to deliver. There is less thought involved, nobody will raise eyebrows and the paperwork is much lighter. So the trend is more about mental energy than grumpiness. They note the significance of the breaks, but do not attempt to disentangle the role of mood improvement / a blood sugar boost / rest.

They explicitly discuss the possibility of hidden variables: "A key aspect for interpreting the association ... is whether an unobserved factor determines case order in such a way that yields the pattern of results we obtain" The dip and spike patterns in the rulings are quite pronounced, and similar graphs in the article for parameters such as the gravity of the offense, presence of a rehabilitation plan and the number of previous incarcerations do not show any such trends. This addresses questions about case scheduling by the clerks. Besides which - even if the clerks did organize easier cases for later in the day, this would manifest as one long trend over the entire day, not the spike/decay sequence shown.

So I didn't see any gaping holes, and more importantly it seems quite a plausible conclusion to me. Surely you must have had a similar experience going Christmas shopping - you start out thinking very carefully about getting the perfect gift for every person, but after 3 hours trudging around in a mall you'll just buy any old shit so you can go home. As you get tired you just start taking the easiest options.

colanderman2• 15 years ago

The fact that the judges can pick their breaks makes me suspicious that there might be a correlation/causation conflation going on here. A possible explanation could be that the workload is trimodal, and judges tend to take breaks after particularly depressing (parole denied) cases.

How food-breaks sway the decisions of judges

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