Hungry judge effect
The hungry judge effect is the claim that judges become more lenient after a meal break. 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] Later analyses and simulations suggested that the result 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]
Consequences
Interventions of AI and algorithms in the court such as COMPAS software are usually motivated by hungry judge effect. However, some argue that the hungry judge effect is overstated in justifying the use of AI in law.[6]
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", Judgment and Decision Making, 11 (6): 601–610, doi:10.1017/S1930297500004812, S2CID 19192291
- ^ 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.
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