Via “Dan Sperber”:http://www.cognitionandculture.net/Dan-s-blog/what-the-judge-ate-for-breakfast.html (whose classic “epidemiological account of culture”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0631200452/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0631200452 is criminally under-read by political scientists) this “piece”:http://lsolum.typepad.com/files/danziger-levav-avnaim-pnas-2011.pdf.
bq. Our data consist of 1,112 judicial rulings, collected over 50 days in a 10 month period, by eight Jewish-Israeli judges (two females) who preside over two different parole boards that serve four major prisons in Israel. … The two parole boards process ?40% of all parole requests in the country. The prisons house felons convicted of crimes such as embezzlement, assault, theft, murder, and rape. Each parole board is composed of one judge, as well as a criminologist and a social worker who provide the judge with professional advice. For each day we obtained the entire set of rulings.
bq. In our data, we record the two daily food breaks that the judge takes–a late morning snack and lunch–which serve to break up the day’s deliberations into three distinct “decision sessions.” … The meal is typically served to the judge at the bench and its timing, which is determined by the judge, varies by day.
The graph is striking (the dotted lines indicate the meal breaks).
This is also interesting.
bq. The lack of a significant effect of prisoner ethnicity indicates that the Jewish-Israeli judges in our sample treated prisoners equally regardless of ethnicity. Although previous research does hint at the presence of effects of prisoners’ and judges’ race on sentencing decisions, in some cases, as in ours, such effects are weak or absent.