How rational are people? In 2011, a now-famous study of eight Israeli judges found that the answer was: not much.
The researchers observed the day-to-day decisions made by parole boards regarding inmates who had committed various crimes. At the start of hearings, judges typically ruled in favor of a prisoner’s parole application about 65 percent of the time. But as the session went on — and, the researchers argued, as jurors moved further and further away from their last meal — the decisions became increasingly negative.
In fact, immediately before each of the three daily lunch breaks, the percentage of positive decisions dropped to zero. It then jumped back up to around 65 percent after the judges had a break and some food.
Investigators argued that the judges had not seen less hardened criminals in previous hearings; indeed it seemed that hunger or fatigue forced them to be much stricter in their decisions.
It’s a beautiful, understandable story, and a perfect example, to use the title of the article reporting on the investigation, “weird factors in court decisions.” That is, he supports the idea that no matter how hard we try, we cannot make our rational mind immune to irrational feelings.
That’s why she’s interested psychologist Daniel Kahneman, whose 2011 bestseller on human (ir)rationality, Think fast and think slowHe described the “disturbing” study and made it a famous example. It is also popular in science: according to the Google Scholar search engine, this study has been cited in more than 1,700 other scientific articles.
But with all that attention came a test. Are judges making such completely different decisions due to completely irrational factors? The critique revealed what, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a very good point: the research is having an impact that seems too big to be realistic. If hunger really affected our brains this way, “our society would be thrown into a little chaos every day at 11:45 pm.”
Another clever point is that the results may have to do with jurors’ time management: they may not have wanted to take on a particularly complex and difficult case just before recess and insisted on starting when they got back.
It is likely that more complex cases are also more likely to be resolved favorably, perhaps because many mitigating factors are taken into account. Perhaps that is why so many positive decisions are made immediately after the break.
So there is every reason to be skeptical about this original, highly publicized study of “hungry judges”. But here’s something else to consider: A new Hungry Judges study just came out – and it thinks so. Opposite Effect.
The new study is based on a vast dataset spanning decades of judgments by thousands of judges in India and Pakistan. Instead of overseeing decision-making throughout the day, which is related to the problem of time management described above, he uses the fact that all Muslim judges in these countries fast during the month of the year before Ramadan. Not only that, but the fact that Ramadan lasts from sunrise to sunset because it can occur at different times of the year from year to year, and because different places have slightly different day lengths due to their geographical location, some judges have experienced more long periods of fasting. than others. With this option, the researchers could ask if the longer fasts — and thus more severe famines — led to different court rulings.
And it turned out … sort of. The study’s key finding is that judges are about 10 percent more likely to acquit a defendant for each additional hour of fasting. Yes, it is true: more probably justify. Thus, in contrast to the Israel study, the hungrier the judges in this study were, the more forgiving they were. For non-Muslim judges during Ramadan, there was no difference, probably because they ate normally.
They also had data on successful appeals, ie. when a referee’s decision is later reversed by another referee. They found that judges who fasted longer during Ramadan were less likely to appeal their decisions. The researchers interpreted this as evidence that fasting actually made the judges better in a dispute – they may have learned all the facts of the case better and were less likely to reverse the decision.
Why should hunger help you make better decisions? The authors suggest that the physiological benefits of fasting, which have been studied in some studies, may have improved judges’ ability to think during Ramadan. It is also possible that the religious significance of Ramadan changed their attitude towards the defendants they condemned.
However, the data – especially on the main leniency finding – is quite noisy: there’s a lot going on in the dataset, and the effects are pretty hard to see. Statistically, this means that the statistical tests that the authors used to distinguish real effects from noise produced completely groundbreaking results for Ramadan effects. Not only that, but some unexpected findings, such as the fact that the extra softness of Ramadan, at least in India, seemed to last for months. after post is completely over.
Whether or not the effect of this data is real, one thing we’ve learned for sure is that the impact of hunger on judges’ decisions is much smaller than we thought in 2011.
If the effect were the same size as in the earlier study, there would be absolutely no problem distinguishing it from the noise in the newer study. But nothing in the Ramadan study compares to the dramatic impact seen in the study of Israeli judges, the results of which now appear to be the result of error or oversimplification.
In retrospect, it seems much more likely that feelings like hunger have little to no effect on our decisions. Of course, we would like to know if the effect is true and mitigate it, since judicial decisions should be made solely on the basis of the case. But if hunger was such a big deal in our justice system, we wouldn’t need research—we’d already know.
Yet millions of people read Kahneman’s book, an uncritical exposition of the Hungry Judges Study; many others have reread it in his latest bestseller. They “learned” that people are so irrational that even the pangs of hunger can have a huge impact on important, serious decisions regarding people’s lives and freedom. But if the study of Ramadan shows anything, it’s that the era of simple, powerful stories about human psychology is over. After all, how likely is it that something like human rationality will ever be easy?
Source: I News
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