Hacker News Reader

Comment by tylervigen | Hacker News Reader

This is fascinating.

For those unfamiliar, the original study found that judges were kinder in their decisions right after lunch, and harshest right before. (I’m dramatically oversimplifying, but that’s the bit folks usually cite.)

This study contests the strength of that finding by showing that positive rulings take longer, and that you can fit more simple negative rulings in just before a break (negative rulings are denials of parole, if you’re wondering why they are faster). Judges don’t want to start complex cases that are more likely to be favorable just before break. (Again, dramatically simplifying. The article has more.)

I have cited the original study countless times, and this injects a lot more nuance for me. I’m glad it was revisited.

View on HN

Coming from a psychology major myself, scientific studies should never be cited before being reproduced, especially not psychology studies.

Should at least eat lunch before deciding to cite them if you’re not going to wait for replication.

Unreviewed studies say yes

It seems a lot of the (pop) psychology taken for granted is based on single, flawed studies.

Exactly. Just like that one study saying how cyclists wearing helmets in trafic are more in danger than those without because car drivers supposedly are more careful with the non helmet wearing crowd, that peers here keep bringing up as a reason to cycle without a helmet.

Tip from my SO who does ER work at the hospital: wear a helmet to give her less work

Without having read in-depth either original paper, it seems like the issue here is much simpler than reproduction (though reproduction is the gold standard as is totally under-appreciated these days).

Rather, it seems the authors made a much simpler mistake: hypotheses can only be refuted by evidence, not confirmed. So, in this case, if the hypothesis is "judges act more harshly when hungry", what they should have been doing is looking for evidence disproving that statement. Instead, they seem to have presented a correlation and a suggestion, which is not the same thing as a scientific finding.

Aren't there only like four laws in psychology?

Only if psychology is applied physics!

There was another article related to this study that hit the HN front page. It talked about the size of effect, and argued that the effect size was ridiculously big, and if true, we should see giant spikes in car crashes around lunch, big enough for common sense to ban driving just before noon.

I think you'll enjoy the read.

> If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion.

https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry-...

It's always fascinating to see the vapor of trends which seem local and harmless - work sucks, i can't wait for lunch - condensed into real-world results. In the same vein is an infamous study correlating the beginning of daylight savings time with a marked increase in heart attacks [0].

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254245482...

Did anybody ever ask the judges/clerks about this finding? It seems like the whole thing could have been rebutted with one phone call and the judge saying “yeah, we make the schedules and intentionally backload the negative/easy ones”

They have incentive to hide it. Ordinary people want to think the justice system actually does justice. Not group cases by time slot because they are likely to be simply denied, which is clearly biased.

Personally this is more disturbing to me than the alleged earlier finding that the judge was in a bad mood because he was hungry. At least that is correctable and avoidable; systemic discrimination by case type isn't.

It is absolutely correct to systematically discriminate by ‘case type’ if ‘case type’ means severity of charges. You don’t want arsonists to be granted parole as easily as jaywalkers.

You are maybe forgetting that the job of judges is judgment.

Not forgetting, just don't agree. The job of judges is justice. Presuming bias by stacking case type is not justice.

That’s not what’s happening. What do you think is happening?

They arent hiding anything nefarious, they’re just organizing their day. Start a session with the cases most likely to run long and have extra paperwork so you’re more likely to finish at the right time and not go over

Reply on news.ycombinator.com