The luck of the draw

When it comes to mental fatigue on the job and its potential to alter the course of a reasonably good day or life, air traffic controllers have received all the press lately. Other professionals take their turn periodically in the spotlight. It may be tired long-haul truckers ramming 18-wheelers into vehicles on the highway. Or young medical residents making serious mistakes during extended shifts.

We can easily imagine ourselves as potential victims of whichever group happens to be the focus of the moment, and we hope someone would do something — say, regulate shifts for truckers or new doctors or pilots— to eliminate the randomness.

I haven't heard much about judicial fatigue, though, and what that could mean for people who come up for judgment. That was no fault of researchers interested in the habits of highly experienced judges, as it turns out.

While I was obsessing about the napping scandals of air traffic controllers, I missed an intriguing study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month. The takeaway from the study, to put it simply, is this: If you have any chance of being hauled before the bench sometime, you might want to pay attention to the eating schedules of judges. (Not that knowing will do you a whole lot of good, but it might offer fair indication regarding your odds for a favorable decision.)

Apparently, a prickly issue in legal circles is whether, as some would have us believe, judicial rulings are based impartially, objectively and rationally on the law and on the facts. Or, as others contend, decisions from the bench are tainted by all sorts of extraneous social, political and psychological factors.

Unlike poets, scientists have a rather low threshold for ambiguity, so a pair of researchers, one from Columbia University and the other from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, set out clarify things. They wanted ''to test the common caricature of realism that justice is 'what the judge ate for breakfast.' . . . ''

Here's what the researchers did. For 50 days over a period of 10 months, they followed the work and break sessions of eight judges on an Israeli parole board as they ruled on more than 1,100 applications from prisoners seeking parole or changes to their prison terms.

They found that on average 65 percent of the rulings the judges made at the beginning of the day were favorable to the prisoners, but as the session wore on, the favorable decisions would decline, sometimes to zero. After a snack break, the favorable rulings would bounce back to about 65 percent and decline again during the session.

Jonathan Levav, the Columbia University researcher, described the pattern thus to an interviewer on Public Radio International:

''There is a meal and, boom, they [the favorable decisions] pop back up. Then they go down. Boom, there is a meal, and they pop back up. So if you are a prisoner, you really want to come right after the meal or at the beginning of the day. The problem is that as a prisoner, you don't know where you are going to be in the sequence.''

And there's the luck of the draw, the randomness factor: in this case, the relevance of when judges ate (and quite possibly what judges ate as well) as they slog from one decision to another, the rulings affecting many lives in varying degrees. (The study also found the judges took less time making unfavorable decisions but more words explaining the verdicts. There may be something, after all, to the caution to avoid making important decisions on an empty stomach or when you are tired.)

Some studies have established a link between blood glucose level and the quality of decisions a person makes. Though this study of the parole board judges did not test their blood sugar levels, I'd hate for a judge's hunger pangs or the length of time between meal breaks to make the difference to my freedom.

Parole applicants may be in for it with tired and hungry judges, but I can think of other situations where the parole board findings would resonate as well. Other judges — not necessarily of the legal kind — pick winners and losers, sometimes with far-reaching consequences. College admissions boards come to mind, for example. Or hearing officers for immigration and visa applicants.

Much as we trust that guidelines and facts and policies impose a measure of rational judgment, there is an element of randomness to success and failure that inspires humility. Who knows where a snack break by a judge made all the difference?