The best and worst times to have your case reviewed by a judge | Randal S. Olson:
Shockingly, the judges appear to be much more inclined to approve a
parole request when they’ve just come off a break. In contrast, they
reject far more requests than usual the closer they get to break time —
and nearly 100% of the requests just before they take a break.
This study provides a classic example of depletion effects in human judgement,
a theory which suggests that we have a limited amount of mental energy
to expend during a working period. The longer we work on mentally
strenuous tasks, the more mental energy we expend, and eventually we’ll
run out and start falling back to these easy — and often wrong — default
decisions.