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Comment by cptaj | Hacker News Reader

Yeah thats the original point but I think he means aside from that, the order itself also drops a suggestion to the judge as to the nature of the case before hearing it.

The order itself might be injecting a subconscious bias to the judge.

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I think maybe the judges can tell how important cases are based on the charges. I don't think the implication is that someone is somehow reviewing the case prior to it being heard and using some judgement based on some (likely unknown as it has not yet been presented) evidence to order them, but that charges that carry less penalty or that are are already classified as lesser (i.e. misdemeanor compared to felony) are sorted prior to ones that are not.

I don't think the people sorting the cases (which could be the judges themselves) have any additional information that the judge doesn't readily have available, so I'm not sure there's much room for bias of a substantial nature.

That’s good point. The authors of the original papers the “hungry judge” idea also did work on what they call “priming” which would include what you suggest. I don’t know if that has been replicated though.

This is not an example of the priming effect, which describes how one stimulus affects the reaction to a different stimulus, but is simply an example of suggestion for a common stimulus. The priming effect itself has come under fire in recent years for failure to replicate.

Examples of priming include what was studied in the Priming Intelligence study, which primed groups of participants with the idea of either professors or the idea of hooligans, then tested how they performed on an intelligence test. It purported to discover that those primed with the idea of professors performed better. This is an example of a widely discussed priming study that has failed replication.

It's not as if the judge does not have all the details of the case prior to sentencing. The order can't possibly supply more information than the fact that he just sat through the trial himself days or weeks prior. At least in the United States, the same judge who presides over a trial is the one who sentences the convicted. The only time a defendant gets different judges for anything is early in the process, like during arraignment.

Knowing the details and being subconsciously influenced are different questions. Ambient music in stores doesn’t change the prices, products, or a shoppers needs yet it still influences buying behavior.

Suppose a taste tester is asked to rank something on a scale of 1-100, but before giving a number they need to presort them into terrible, ok, good, great then go back to each group and give a specific score to each item. My guess is there would be different clustering vs someone doing the same task in one go.

Adding to this, even knowing the subconscious biases doesn't necessarily mitigate them. Kahneman talked about how he was still subjected to such biases, even though he was an expert in studying and identifying them.

What ‘subconscious influence’ are you assuming here? The cases are ordered in a known, public, obvious way by known, public, obvious criteria. Are you thinking that a judge would not know the difference between the severity of charges if they weren’t grouped together? That he would be inclined to think a jaywalking case sandwiched between two murders was just as serious? This argument seems unlikely in the extreme.

I’m suggesting the exact opposite situation, ie groups of equal severity create a subconscious bias even if it’s the Judge that makes them.

A jaywalking case seems meaningless when sandwiched between just about anything because objectively it’s not serious. However 20 murder cases and you might start benchmarking things to the pedo cannibal not each case on it’s own merits.

If all you see is 20 white collar crimes row with several 10+ million dollar cases someone who ‘only’ stole 100 thousand seems almost meaningless even if objectively it’s a lot of money. And that exact loss of objectivity is a problem.

What loss of objectivity? What you are describing bears no relationship to the study or… any real case that we’re discussing.

> What loss of objectivity?

Bias is a loss of objectivity.

> What you are describing bears no relationship to the study or… any real case that we’re discussing.

Study says before lunch cases are meaningfully different than the after lunch case, thus it’s a like with like grouping.

I referenced a known effect where grouping like with like can create a subconscious bias. Sure it’s best known in other contexts, but there’s little to suggest sentencing is somehow uniquely unbiased.

The study involved parole boards, not initial sentencing from an initial trial.

So these people have already received fair sentences, and they have to serve them out? What's the problem?

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