Pretrial release judgments and decision fatigue

Abstract

Field studies in many domains have found evidence of decision fatigue, a phenomenon describing how decision quality can be impaired by the act of making previous decisions. Debate remains, however, over posited psychological mechanisms underlying decision fatigue, and the size of effects in high-stakes settings. We examine an extensive set of pretrial arraignments in a large, urban court system to investigate how judicial release and bail decisions are influenced by the time an arraignment occurs. We find that release rates decline modestly in the hours before lunch and before dinner, and these declines persist after statistically adjusting for an extensive set of observed covariates. However, we find no evidence that arraignment time affects pretrial release rates in the remainder of each decision-making session. Moreover, we find that release rates remain unchanged after a meal break even though judges have the opportunity to replenish their mental and physical resources by resting and eating. In a complementary analysis, we find that the rate at which judges concur with prosecutorial bail requests does not appear to be influenced by either arraignment time or a meal break. Taken together, our results imply that to the extent that decision fatigue plays a role in pretrial release judgments, effects are small and inconsistent with previous explanations implicating psychological depletion processes.

Artificial intelligence and judicial decision-making: Evaluating the role of AI in debiasing

“…cialized court (all being indicative of contrast effects) are variables likely to influence the way judges decide. Other factors besides biases include the time of day at which a decision is made (Shroff and Vamvourellis 2022;Danziger et al 2011), and temperature (Chen and Loecher 2019;Heyes and Saberian 2019). These are of course only initial suggestions and do not fully encompass all the irrelevant covariates that can affect a decision.…”