Here's some alarming news: Just like you, judges
get hangry. Unlike you, they have the ability to turn people's lives upside
down. The research says that judges are more lenient in their decisions
immediately after eating.
INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN HUNGRY
In 2010, Professor Shai Danziger and his team analyzed the
decisions of eight judges in 1,112 parole-board hearings in Israeli prisons
over ten months to test the truth behind a common joke: "Justice is
what the judge had for breakfast." The quip is symbolic of what's known as
legal realism, or the idea that because the justice system is run by humans,
it's subject to the same biases and imperfections as humans are.
They grouped the judges' decisions to accept or reject a request
for parole in three sessions per day: from breakfast to the late-morning snack
break, from the snack break to lunch, and from lunch to dinner. The results
showed that the old joke contains a lot of truth: judges were much more likely
to accept a request for parole at the beginning of the workday and after a food
break than later in a session. That was true regardless of the length of their
overall sentence or whether they'd been in prison before, and the researchers
ruled out the possibility that the results were due to judges feeling that
they'd filled a "quota" of favorable decisions early in a session.
SHOULD WE BE WORRIED?
Perhaps the scariest part of this finding is that the judges had
no idea this was the case. According to Ed Yong of Discover Magazine, the
judges didn't predict this effect, even though they are well aware of their own
actions. The criminologists or social workers who sit on the parole boards
hadn't realized either.
Jonathan Levav, who co-led the study, said, "There are no
checks about the judges' decisions because no one has ever documented this
tendency before. Needless to say, I would expect there to be something put into
place after this."
Bottom
line: hanger is real, and it can have a big impact. One study showed that
people with low blood sugar will stick more pins in a voodoo doll of their
spouse than those who are well fed. Another study found that states with
high diabetes rates and therefore frequent bouts of low blood sugar also had
high violent crime rates. The moral of the story? Don't make big decisions
on an empty stomach.
Curiousity.com
Written by Ashley
Hamer
Judge not, lest ye be judged---God (& fishducky)
