Willpower

known, are often caricatured as defining justice to be “what the judge ate for breakfast.”
    Now their definition has been tested by a team of psychologists led by Jonathan Levav of Columbia University and Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University. They reviewed more than one thousand decisions made over the course of ten months by judges who took turns presiding over the parole board of an Israeli prison system. Each judge, after hearing prisoners’ appeals and getting advice from the criminologist and sociologist on the parole board, would decide whether to release the criminal on parole. By awarding parole, the judge could please the prisoner and the prisoner’s family, and save the taxpayers’ money. But there was also the risk that the paroled prisoner would go on to commit another crime.
    On average, each judge approved parole for only about one of every three prisoners, but there was a striking pattern to the decisions of all the judges, as the researchers found. The prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 65 percent of the time. Those who appeared late in the day won parole less than 10 percent of the time. Thus, the odds favored the prisoner in our Case 1, who appeared at 8:50 A.M., the second case of the day—and he did in fact receive parole. But even though the prisoner in Case 4 was serving the same sentence for the same crime—fraud—the odds were against him when he appeared (on a different day) at 4:25 P.M. Like most of the other prisoners who appeared late in the afternoon, he was denied parole.
    The change from the morning to the afternoon didn’t occur at a steady rate, though. There were other striking patterns during the day. In midmorning, usually a little before 10:30, the parole board would take a break, and the judges would be served a sandwich and a piece of fruit. That would replenish the glucose in their bloodstreams. (Remember the studies about how children who skipped breakfast would suddenly start to behave and learn better after the midmorning snack?) The prisoners who happened to appear just before the break had only about a 15 percent chance of getting parole, which means that only about one out of seven would get to leave the prison. In contrast, the ones who came right after the food break had around a 65 percent chance—about two out of three.
    The same pattern happened with lunch. At 12:30 P.M., just before lunch, the chances of getting parole were only 20 percent, but if you came up right after lunch, the chances were more than 60 percent. The prisoner in Case 2 was lucky enough to be the first one to appear after the lunch break, and he did indeed receive parole. The prisoner in Case 3 was serving the same sentence for the same crime, assault, and he also appeared in the afternoon—but later, at 3:10 P.M. Instead of being the first prisoner to appear after the lunch break, he was the twelfth, and he suffered the usual fate at that late hour: Parole was denied.
    Judging is hard mental work. As the judges made one decision after another, their brains and bodies used up glucose, that crucial component of willpower that we discussed earlier. Whatever their personal philosophy—whether they were known for being tough on crime or sympathetic to the potential for rehabilitation—they had fewer available mental resources to make further decisions. And so, apparently, they tended to go for the less risky choice (for themselves, anyway). As horribly unfair as it was for the prisoner—why should he linger in jail just because the judge hadn’t yet had his midmorning snack?—such bias is not an isolated phenomenon. It occurs naturally in all kinds of situations. The link between willpower and decision making works both ways: Decision making depletes your willpower, and once your willpower is depleted, you’re less able to make decisions. If your work requires you to make hard decisions all day long, at some point you’re going to be depleted and start looking for ways to conserve energy. You’ll look for excuses to avoid or postpone decisions. You’ll look for the easiest and safest option, which often is to stick with the status quo: Leave the prisoner in prison.
    Denying parole can also seem like the easier call to the judge because it leaves more options open: The judge retains the option of paroling the prisoner at a future date without sacrificing the option of keeping him securely in prison right now. Part of the resistance against making