Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

by Annie Duke

The study, encompassing over 6,000 federal appeals and nearly 20,000 individual votes, found, not surprisingly, that judicial voting generally followed political lines. Pure, unaided open-mindedness, even by life-tenured judges sworn to uphold the law, is hard. When there was political diversity on the panels, the researchers found several areas where that diversity improved the panel’s work. Even though, in most cases, two politically similar judges could dictate the panel’s outcome, there were significant differences between heterogeneous and homogeneous panels. A single panelist from the other party had “a large disciplining effect.” They found, for example, “strong evidence of ideological dampening” in environmental cases. Democrat appointees, who overall voted for plaintiffs 43% of the time, voted for plaintiffs just 10% of the time when sitting with two Republican appointees. Republican appointees, who overall voted for plaintiffs 20% of the time, voted for plaintiffs 42% of the time when seated with two Democrat appointees. This held up across most of the twenty-five categories of cases in which they had a sufficiently large sample to reach a conclusion. The authors concluded that the result endorsed the importance of exposure to diverse viewpoints: “What is necessary is reasonable diversity, or diversity of reasonable views . . . and that it is important to ensure that judges, no less than anyone else, are exposed to it, and not merely through the arguments of advo...