Perhaps, but the original paper (harsher sentences before lunch) does not defy "common sense." Common sense tells people that when they are hungry, they are irritable. Many people are familiar with the concept of feeling "hangry."
Sure that’s why it’s plausible but it defies common sense to assume that judges are not managing their own hunger to the extent that it’s affecting their job performance.
Why wouldn’t surgeons or pilots have the same problem?
The paper is sensational because of the implications it has for the social justice causes certain people are obsessed about.
>to assume that judges are not managing their own hunger to the extent that it’s affecting their job performance.
>Why wouldn’t surgeons or pilots have the same problem?
Firstly, this is such an incredibly naive view of the world, especially in regards to the type of professionals that proliferate the legal system.
Past that, surgeons and pilots DO have these issues. The airline industry has religious standards and procedures for how pilots prepare and "rate" themselves before a flight mainly due to how visible egregious pilot errors typically are; in the case of surgeons the insurance company does it best to sweep things under the rug.
Pilots are supposed to be well rested, but then you have incidents like Northwest Airlines Flight 188[1], and pilots admitting they fall asleep more than you would imagine[2].
It's hard to gather data on surgeon-specific incidents since the medical industry does its very best to sweep things under the rug, but it's estimated that 400,000 deaths occur unnecessarily while in the hospital due to medical malpractice [3].
None of these systems or data are made available in the legal system, because it's all "scratch my back" etc. So no, you really shouldn't trust judges (or anyone else in the legal system) since there are no systems of accountability.
Parole judges are not accountable for their work in the same way surgeons or pilots are. If a judge makes a bad call on a parole hearing, a person stays in prison and it's effectively impossible to challenge the decision. Parole hearings are extremely subjective, so it's vanishingly unlikely that a judge will face any repercussions for making a ruling which people would consider unfair.
This means that there's no pressure for them to manage the influence of factors like hunger on their decision.
So it is impacting those highly empirical disciplines and they have managed to develop no standards and practices? But they have around food poisoning?
I don't think this is totally unreasonable, nor unique to judges.
For example, the developed world rolled out school lunch programs as a way to improve academic performance, which at the time of implementation was controversial.
Skipping lunch is bad for school performance, but judges aren't skipping lunch. Judges eat their lunch at a regular scheduled time and so they can naturally adjust their eating habits to get them through the day without experiencing discomforting hunger.
that's exactly what the original study was proposing as an effect:
> They found that the probability of a favorable decision drops from about 65% to almost 0% from the first ruling to the last ruling within each session and that the rate of favorable rulings returns to 65% in a session following a food break.
it's not unreasonable as an original hypothesis; and it's good that we're testing it and finding out later that it's wrong. but the base hypothesis is not particularly egregious.
It's unusual for people to experience mentally distracting hunger pangs before lunch on a regular basis, because people tend to eat larger dinners and/or breakfasts to get them to lunch without significant discomfort. Debilitating hunger is an unusual experience that comes from skipping meals for some unusual reason, a break in somebody's normal routine.
See https://health.clevelandclinic.org/is-being-hangry-really-a-...