The Hungry Judge Effect
Mondays, am I right?
In case you haven’t heard, I enlisted in the U.S. Army for a near-five year contract.
I’ve been pretty lucky to get stationed in Washington State, about an hour south of Seattle.
I was born here, I’m a die-hard Seattle Seahawks fan, and I’ve just always wanted to live up here.
Even luckier than getting stationed here, I’m stationed with 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne).
I’m not a SF guy myself but my job is to support the Special Forces guys (a.k.a. the “Green Berets”).
Anyway one of the benefits of working at this unit is we receive at least one four-day weekend a month.
Today, even though it’s Monday, I decided to go to Top Golf to practice my meek golf swing.
Since it’s at least a 45-minute drive to Top Golf, I decided to play a podcast from one of my creators (Big Think).
The title of the episode was “You have no free will at all | Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky.”
In this episode, the Stanford professor talked about the prefrontal cortex and all of its complexities.
I won’t summarize everything he said but you can click the button below to take you to the full episode.
Also, I’ll have a link later that takes you straight to what I’ll be talking about today.
Anyway, he talks about the hungry judge effect and how there was this case study that analyzed the legal rulings of Israeli parole boards judges.
In 2011, Danziger, Levav, and Avnaim-Pesso looked at all the rulings that the judges gave over the course of several years.
The three looked at thousands of rulings to see what was the underlying predictor for whether someone gets parole or gets sent back to jail.
They discovered that the first ruling in the morning had a 65% of receiving parole, and then dwindled down to 0% after some time.
The first ruling sometime in the afternoon also had a 65% of receiving parole, before again dwindling down to 0% sometime later.
What was the conclusion?
They concluded that the highest chance of parole came right after the judges had a meal.
In other words, eating food restored judges’ ability to think and make better decisions!
In fact, when a judge was asked why one person who committed X received parole and why another person who also committed X did not receive parole, the judge gave some blanket statement to save face instead of realizing that his/her glucose levels were lower at one of the times.
Some critics claim that it’s not necessarily that having a full belly helps us make better decisions, but rather that the brain has a mental capacity and a food break (or maybe any break) helps us become rational thinkers.
Click on this link to take you to my summary of the book “Chatter” and how breaks can involuntarily recharge our brains!
Lesson Learned
Isn’t it obvious…?
Keep food and snacks in the classroom!
We don’t want to be making terrible decisions as the minutes get closer to either lunch or dismissal so make sure to have something handy so we’re constantly refueling our brain.
Since the brain uses roughly 25% of our energy, fruits, and other light snacks can help keep our glucose levels up.
Do you have an important meeting to attend to?
Try to eat a meal right before.
Lastly, keep some snacks around for the kids too! They make decisions as well!
“Do I subtract left to right or right to left?”
“Is it spelled with a ‘silent e?’”
“Should I go ask Mr. Park for help or should I just go home and figure it out somehow?”
This was just me but I always made sure that there were snacks around in the classroom. I had a classroom job helping package the food into small sandwich bags.
I get it.
We spend so much money on our kids as it is…
If that’s you then see if you can encourage parents to pack extra things for the students to bring something with them constantly so they can make the best of each day.
Are there local donations that you can receive for snacks?
Play around with it and explore your options.
Why?
We want the best for ourselves and our students so if learning that food can help us make better decisions, it’s worth a shot.
