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Judges in the United States tend to give defendants longer sentences the day after switching to daylight saving time compared with other days of the year, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Previous research has shown that people tend to sacrifice, on average, about 40 minutes of sleep when they "spring forward" to daylight saving time, and even this small amount of lost sleep can have negative consequences, including an increase in workplace injuries, slacking off at work, and auto accidents. The results of this new research suggest that shortened sleep associated with the change to daylight saving time might also affect the severity of sentences doled out by judges.
"We find that the sentences given to those convicted of crimes may be partially polluted by the sleep of those giving the punishments," says researcher Kyoungmin Cho of the University of Washington, first author on the study. "Sleep is a factor that should not play a role in their sentences, but does."
Journal Reference:
Kyoungmin Cho, Christopher M. Barnes, Cristiano L. Guanara. Sleepy Punishers Are Harsh Punishers: Daylight Saving Time and Legal Sentences. Psychological Science, 2016 DOI: 10.1177/0956797616678437
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday January 02 2017, @04:07PM
Yeah, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. One of the even more distressing ones are the studies that seem to show that judges seem prone to the "gambler's fallacy" illusion where they think that because a case or two went one way that they should likely have a case ruling the other way coming up. One such study looked at granting asylum cases [stanford.edu] to refugees and found that if a judge had granted asylum in the previous two cases that the next request's chances of getting asylum were reduced by 6.7% from the normal grant rate.
So, if you're unlucky enough to be scheduled on a day when the previous people had strong requests, your chances of getting it are reduced -- not by a HUGE amount, but I'm sure that's no comfort to those refugees whose lives are sometimes on the line.