That Jerk Of A Judge Just Needs A Snack Break

It seems that our judges could stand to learn the first point because research indicates that judges are the absolute worst when they're hungry....

Remember that Snickers ad where Joe Pesci is an angry jerk because he hasn’t had a Snickers? Or more accurately, some normal guy is transformed into angry-jerk Joe Pesci because he hasn’t had a Snickers. It taught a couple of valuable lessons:

1) The cure to intemperance is nougat.
2) Don Rickles is still alive.

It seems that our judges could stand to learn the first point because research indicates that judges are the absolute worst when they’re hungry….

A computer science Ph.D. candidate named Randy Olson recently dug up these findings about the inconsistency of judicial decisionmaking throughout the day. While reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (affiliate link), Olson was struck by a citation to a research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers analyzed Israeli judges ruling on parole applications. Rather than consistently granting 36 percent of applications — the average for these judges — the judges do this, according to the study:

Take away the gavel and give that judge a bowl of M&Ms. Judicial robes are basically muumuus anyway, so there’s no need to fret about that waistline (Justice Scalia sure doesn’t). Olson notes:

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This study provides a classic example of depletion effects in human judgement, a theory which suggests that we have a limited amount of mental energy to expend during a working period. The longer we work on mentally strenuous tasks, the more mental energy we expend, and eventually we’ll run out and start falling back to these easy — and often wrong — default decisions.

Putting aside the fact that delayed snack time kept people rotting in prison who could otherwise have gone free, this study should caution lawyers deep in the midst of a five-hour, non-stop work session that it might be time to get up and take a walk around to clear your head. You might try to convince yourself to push on because you’re making so much progress, but no matter how much “progress” you think you’re making, the odds are that you’re only making headway because you’ve stopped thinking and reverted to easy defaults.

So go down the hall and chat with a colleague, grab a snack, play a round of 2048, blow a few rails. Whatever you’ve got to do.

The best and worst times to have your case reviewed by a judge [Randal S. Olson]
Extraneous factors in judicial decisions [PNAS]

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