Summary: A Follow-USudy

The researchers hypothesized that as judges worked through a series of cases, they increasingly chose to deny requests for parole due to mental depletion. Danziger et al referred to previous research suggesting that making multiple consecutive decisions in other domains resulted in decreased mental resources, though these effects can be counteracted by glucose intake or resting briefly. The researchers collected data from the rulings on parole requests of eight Jewish-Israeli judges over ten months. The researchers split the judges’ days into three distinct periods based on their two meal breaks, specifically looking at the change in rate of acceptance/rejection of parole requests during these “‘decision sessions’” (Danziger et al, 2011, p. 6889). The researchers found that the rate of dropped from approximately 65% at the beginning of a session to almost 0% by the end. They controlled for relevant factors such as idiosyncrasies of each judge, the defendant’s demographic information, and legal factors of each case; the only other factors with statistical significance were previous incarcerations and participation in a rehabilitation program. The researchers …show more content…
The researchers reference a specific study which found that a ten-minute break resulted in restored mental resources and therefore unaffected decision-making facilities (Tyler & Burns, 2008). Given this finding, taking a short rest period after each decision might decrease the effect of the judges’ mental states on the outcome of each parole request. In this study, the judges would still have two longer breaks like the original study, but each decision would be followed by a ten-minute break. I hypothesize that the measured change in the rate of request acceptance for each of the three decision sessions would be significantly smaller than that found in the previous