The rationality and objectivity of our decision-making process is something that we should always hold open to question. Even those who are trained to make decisions in as neutral and fair of a manner as possible can be influenced to make unfair decisions. Some of those influences are obvious, like politics and ethnicity. Some are bizarre, like when you last ate!
Recently a study was done by decisions made by judges in Israel from 2000 to 2004. They were all small claims court decisions, so nothing with major media, political, or religious implications. Some of the results were unfortunate, though not entirely surprising:
They found a pattern of ingroup bias: Jewish judges favored Jewish plaintiffs, and Arab judges favored Arab plaintiffs. By considering the times and locations of civilian fatalities during this period, the authors decompose these decisions into half that were arguably ethnicity-neutral and a more biased half associated with spatial-temporal proximity to terrorism, highlighting that a person's ability to favor their own social group may affect seemingly rational judgments.
Source: Science, September 2, 2011
Another study of 1100 parole board decisions in Israel found a bias towards denying parole -- and thus maintaining the status quo -- that grew over the course of the day. Thus a judge would start out being more willing to consider parole but, over the course of the day, grow more and more reluctant to do so. Nothing changed about the cases (it's not like the worse criminals were saved for later); only the time of day changed.
But this tendency to grow more biased against parole and in favor of the status quo could be eliminated by one simple thing: food. Judges were essentially "reset" in their bias back to where they started in the day after a break for food.
I don't know if they did a control study where judges took a break without food, but that would be useful information. Is it just taking a break that resets bias or is it the addition of getting some nutrition and energy that resets bias? I would tend to suspect the latter -- thinking and concentrating hard for a while can be very draining.
This suggests that if you want to be rational and fair when making decisions, you'll improve your chances -- an the quality of your decisions -- if you're well rested and have eaten a little something recently.
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