Judicial Decisions

The supreme court had an exciting year, and reflecting on it made me think of this article in Drexel University's research magazine, Exel. In the article, Mike Unger discusses research conducted by Adam Benforado and Geoffrey Goodwin. According to Unger their work looks at the intersection of law--especially justice--at the intersection of "cognition, moral psychology and implicit social cognition." I was most distressed by the following:

“Consider our common sense assumptions about judges. We have an idea that there are two kinds of judges in the world: umpires, who just call balls and strikes, and activists, people with agendas. In the book, I unpack evidence from the mind sciences to see if this
conception is accurate. And it turns out, it’s not.”

“All judges are susceptive to various cognitive biases and processes operating beyond their conscious awareness that may sway them one way or another. Little things like the time of day when a judge hears a parole case may have a huge influence,” Benforado adds. “Researchers, for example, recently looked at over a thousand parole decisions and found that first thing in the morning the chance of parole was around 65 percent, but that it dropped to around 0 percent right before a break for a meal. After the break, it shot back up to about 67 percent. That’s not the idea of how our legal system works. No one thinks it happens, or should happen, but when you actually look at the evidence it turns out that these sources of unfairness are having a big impact.”

Scary stuff, huh? I am comforted that, at the least, we now have data upon which to start construcing a solution.