The hungry judge effect is a finding that

judge A judge is a person who presides over court proceedings, either alone or as a part of a panel of judges. A judge hears all the witnesses and any other evidence presented by the barristers or solicitors of the case, assesses the credibility an ...

s were more inclined to be lenient after a meal but more severe before the break. It has been suggested that this may be an artifact of the scheduling of cases, based on their likely outcome and duration.

Original study

A study of the decisions of Israeli

parole board A parole board is a panel of people who decide whether an offender should be released from prison on parole after serving at least a minimum portion of their sentence as prescribed by the sentencing judge. Parole boards are used in many jurisdiction ...

s was made in 2011. This found that the granting of parole was 65% at the start of a session but would drop to nearly zero before a meal break. The paper '' Extraneous factors in judicial decisions'', which was published in the ''

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of Sci ...

'', has been cited many times – 1,380 times by 2021.

Hypotheses

The original paper suggested that mental depletion as a result of fatigue caused decisions to increasingly favour the status quo, while rest and replenishment then restored a willingness to make bold decisions. Later analyses and simulations suggested that the result might arise from scheduling priorities – that cases with a lenient outcome required more time and so would not be scheduled in the time remaining before a break.

Consequences

Interventions of AI and algorithms in the court such as COMPAS software are usually motivated by hungry judge effect. However, some argue that the hungry judge effect is overstated in justifying the use of AI in law.

References

Cognitive biases Decision-making {{social-science-stub