The Myth of the Hungry Judge: A Cautionary Tale in Legal Psychology
The notion that justice depends on what the judge ate for breakfast has become something of a legal truism, cited everywhere from law school lectures to artificial intelligence papers.
The notion that justice depends on what the judge ate for breakfast has become something of a legal truism, cited everywhere from law school lectures to artificial intelligence papers.
Its scientific justification stems from a 2011 study examining Israeli parole board decisions, which found that judges granted parole about 65% of the time at the start of the day and after food breaks, but the rate plummeted to nearly zero before breaks.
The study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, seemed to confirm what legal realists had long suspected: that judicial decision-making is shaped by factors far removed from the law itself.
Danziger, S., Levav, J., & Avnaim-Pesso, L. (2011). Extraneous factors in judicial decisions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(17), 6889-6892. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1018033108
The finding proved irresistible, tapping into deep-seated intuitions about human nature and judicial fallibility. As Chatziathanasiou notes in the German Law Journal, the study “has entered common wisdom” and is “broadly and uncritically used as an argument” across legal scholarship.
The story fits perfectly into the narrative of bounded rationality and cognitive bias that has dominated behavioral science since Kahneman and Tversky. What could be more human than a judge’s judgment being swayed by an empty stomach?
Chatziathanasiou, K. (2022). Beware the Lure of Narratives: “Hungry Judges” Should Not Motivate the Use of “Artificial Intelligence” in Law. German Law Journal, 23(4), 452-464. https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2022.32
But like many perfect stories in social science, this one may be too good to be true. A devastating critique by psychologist Daniel Lakens points out that the reported effect size is implausibly large. “If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude,” Lakens argues, “our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45.” We would have organized our entire judicial system around this overwhelming biological constraint.
The plot thickens further with Andreas Glöckner’s clever statistical analysis showing that much of the apparent effect could be explained by simple time management rather than judicial bias. Since favorable rulings take longer to write, judges rationally avoid starting complex cases right before a scheduled break. Through simulation, Glöckner demonstrated that this scheduling artifact alone could produce the dramatic pattern in the data.
Glöckner, A. (2016). The irrational hungry judge effect revisited: Simulations reveal that the magnitude of the effect is overestimated. Judgment and Decision Making, 11(6), 601-610. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1930297500004812
Additional concerns emerged about non-random case ordering, with unrepresented prisoners typically going last in each session. The original researchers attempted to control for various confounding factors, but as Weinshall-Margel and Shapard point out in their critique, the actual procedures of the parole board involved systematic patterns that weren’t fully accounted for.
The hungry judge effect thus offers a masterclass in how seductive narratives can override scholarly skepticism. We wanted to believe in the biased judge, and so we did, citing the study thousands of times with remarkably little scrutiny of its extraordinary claims. The episode recalls Richard Feynman’s warning that “the first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
None of this definitively proves that judges are immune to the effects of hunger or fatigue. More modest influences of this type may well exist. But the study that launched a thousand citations appears to have dramatically overstated the case. As Chatziathanasiou warns, such exaggerations can damage public trust in the judiciary while providing dubious justification for reforms like increased use of artificial intelligence in legal decision-making.
The hungry judge story thus stands as a cautionary tale about the need to maintain scholarly skepticism even – or especially – when findings confirm our preexisting beliefs.
In law as in science, the most dangerous myths are the ones that feel intuitively right. Sometimes a judge is just a judge, managing their time as best they can, neither perfectly rational nor hopelessly biased.
The truth, as usual, is more mundane but also more interesting than the headlines suggest.
Robert Nogacki – licensed legal counsel (radca prawny, WA-9026), Founder of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec.
There are lawyers who practice law. And there are those who deal with problems for which the law has no ready answer. For over twenty years, Kancelaria Skarbiec has worked at the intersection of tax law, corporate structures, and the deeply human reluctance to give the state more than the state is owed. We advise entrepreneurs from over a dozen countries – from those on the Forbes list to those whose bank account was just seized by the tax authority and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning.
One of the most frequently cited experts on tax law in Polish media – he writes for Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, and Parkiet not because it looks good on a résumé, but because certain things cannot be explained in a court filing and someone needs to say them out loud. Author of AI Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto: Artificial Intelligence on the Trail of Bitcoin’s Creator. Co-author of the award-winning book Bezpieczeństwo współczesnej firmy (Security of a Modern Company).
Kancelaria Skarbiec holds top positions in the tax law firm rankings of Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. Four-time winner of the European Medal, recipient of the title International Tax Planning Law Firm of the Year in Poland.
He specializes in tax disputes with fiscal authorities, international tax planning, crypto-asset regulation, and asset protection. Since 2006, he has led the WGI case – one of the longest-running criminal proceedings in the history of the Polish financial market – because there are things you do not leave half-done, even if they take two decades. He believes the law is too serious to be treated only seriously – and that the best legal advice is the kind that ensures the client never has to stand before a court.
