Comment by cortesoft
2 years ago
Maybe? I don’t think the severity of a case is unknown to the judge, though, even with random ordering.
2 years ago
Maybe? I don’t think the severity of a case is unknown to the judge, though, even with random ordering.
If they are ordered by severity, with the most severe coming just before lunch, the implication is the harsher sentencing is due to the ordering rather than the hunger pangs of the judge. Ie the hunger thesis is a spurious correlation.
I think the person I responded to was talking about actual bias from the judges knowing the order, not about this study.
Yes, this study would absolutely be suspect if the order is not random. I was saying I am not sure if the order being based on severity would bias the judges, since my assumption would be that judges are aware of severity directly and don’t need to rely on ordering to deduce it.