You may have heard the story on PRI's "The World" about Jonathan's Levav's research regarding sequential decision-making and particularly this finding:
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In the legal domain, we demonstrate that parole decisions made by judges in a large prison system in Israel are influenced by the ordinal position of a prisoner’s case and, most strikingly, by the timing of the judge’s meal break. We find that a prisoner is less likely to be released following before a break (i.e., the status quo remains) rather than following a break (keep this in mind next time you’re on trial).
You can download the paper, “Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions" at this link: Download Danziger Levav Avnaim PNAS 2011. For discussion of the origins and accuracy of the supposed reference by Jerome Frank to a judicial decision being determined by what judge's had for breakfast, see Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning 129 n. 15 (Harvard University Press, 2009).
