Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine

by Hannah Fry

In a more recent study, 81 UK judges were asked whether they’d award bail to a number of imaginary defendants.10 Each hypothetical case had its own imaginary back-story and imaginary criminal history. Just like their counterparts in the Virginia study, the British judges failed to agree unanimously on a single one of the 41 cases presented to them.11 But this time, in among the 41 hypothetical cases given to every judge were seven that appeared twice – with the names of the defendants changed on their second appearance so the judge wouldn’t notice they’d been duplicated. It was a sneaky trick, but a revealing one. Most judges didn’t manage to make the same decision on the same case when seeing it for the second time. Astonishingly, some judges did no better at matching their own answers than if they were, quite literally, awarding bail at random.12