Nullary Sources

A study was published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science on a judge’s leniency in relation to the time since his last meal. Katie Moisse of ABC News reported on the findings:

A judge’s willingness to grant a prisoner parole wanes with time after a lunch or snack break, according to an observational study.

Researchers from Columbia University in New York City and Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel, analyzed more than 1,000 parole decisions made during 50 days by eight experienced judges in Israel. The proportion of favorable rulings fell from about 65 percent to nearly zero during each session separated by the two food breaks, leaping back to 65 percent immediately after the breaks.

It’s potentially troubling if this trend is accurate, since it kind of undermines the whole legal system and all. This isn’t really the kind of thing you can do a controlled experiment for, though, so the researchers acknowledge that their approach is a bit flawed:

But because the study by Levav and colleagues was observational, meaning not all variables could be controlled, the researchers can’t directly link hunger to trends in judgment.

“When you don’t run an experiment, it’s hard to make a causal association,” Levav said. “Ideally, we’d have an experiment where one judge takes a break and eats, and another doesn’t eat.”