Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

by Matthew Syed

Now, judges are supposed to be rational and deliberative. They are supposed to make decisions on hard evidence. But Danziger found something quite different: if the case was assessed by a judge just after he had eaten breakfast, the prisoner had a 65 percent chance of getting parole. But as time passed through the morning, and the judges got hungry, the chances of parole gradually diminished to zero. Only after the judges had taken a break to eat did the odds shoot back up to 65 percent, only to decrease back to 0 over the course of the afternoon. The judges were oblivious to this astonishing bias in their deliberations. Criminologists and social workers were also unaware of it. Why? Because it had never been analyzed. As one of the co-authors of the study put it: “There are no checks about the judges’ decisions because no one has ever documented this tendency before. Needless to say, I would expect there to be something put into place after this.”