Coming from a psychology major myself, scientific studies should never be cited before being reproduced, especially not psychology studies.
Tip from my SO who does ER work at the hospital: wear a helmet to give her less work
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.