Interesting bias on the bias: the author of this article seems not to have experienced a prolonged fast themselves, otherwise they'd know this is not true at all:
> "longer fasts – and thus, presumably, greater hunger"
As anyone who has fasted for probably any reason can tell you, the longer the fast the less hungry you are overall AFTER an initial peak. Meaning, miss a meal and you are hungry, miss two and you become very hungry, but miss X* amount of meals and your hunger actually decreases. At some point you can go for days without any hunger at all.
Similar things happen with OMAD (one meal a day) fasting, which is arguably very similar to the mentioned Ramadan, the body gets used really fast* to the new regime and you stop being hungry outside the normal meal hour(s).
* the time specifics depend on many things, mainly on the type of meals you eat before the fast (e.g. sugars/carbs = worse withdrawals) and multiple other factors, but overall seems to be true this peak hunger happens and then hunger decreases.
Yeah, as somebody who has experimented with fasting, I think it's a huge mistake to think that Ramadan fasters would respond like hungry non-fasters.
Fasting is a common religious practice because it is both a challenge and a discipline. To get good at fasting, you have to work to unlearn habits of instant gratification and learn to consciously lean against the urgings of the body. A fasting practice develops real skills.
It's perfectly plausible to me that Ramadan-observing judges would better at judging while hungry while non-fasters would get worse. So this article's author is doing exactly what he criticizes: assuming his naive model is the only explanation.
best option is to just assume every psychology/social sciences article is bullshit, pretty much all of the most famous studies have failed to replicate. And many of those studies were used to justify trillions of dollars in federal spending over the past few decades
If you look at the replies you'll see the huge variety of responses people have to this, which is absolutely fascinating. I think this might actually be different for different people.
This doesn’t ring true for me. It seems more likely to me that, like with alcohol, we merely become less aware of how impaired we actually are.
In Middle Eastern countries road rage incidents and reckless driving skyrocket during Ramadan. And many countries acknowledge this by all but shutting down after 1500 in the afternoon.
+1. And I’ve noticed about myself that the amplitude or my “peak” hunger drops significantly as I sustain more days of intermittent fasting. So the hunger becomes more tolerable, so to speak.
I've done a waterfast before and for me this point was somewhere around the beginning of the third day. I could've kept going really, but I noticed my body had started to break down muscle (day 8.)
As a Muslim, I can say there is something definitely different about Ramadan. It’s supposed to help your spiritual development, so it’s not surprising at all that judges would display more mercy at that time. If anything these two conflicting studies could point to the effect of an intentional spiritual focus, rather than hunger itself.
Big agree on this, they just swapped a handful of confounding variables for another one. The finding that the judges became more merciful with every hour of fasting could be made sense of in that they became more aware of their hunger and so were more aware of the reason they were fasting, their religious beliefs and commitment.
So many comments here claiming to understand the effect of fasting on humans generally through personal experience. Come on, people - your experience is a datum, it's not data, and your entirely subjective conclusions drawn from that datum are not analysis. People's response to fasting varies widely. Hunger is both a physiological and a psychological phenomenon - and like any phenomenon with a psychological component, is highly variable. And our individual ability to release stored glycogen in order to maintain metabolic function without eating also varies widely. There is no single experience of fasting.
Data is also overrated. Data is often highly convoluted, with multiple causes in one correlation.
We want to understand the way things work, and correlation can give us hints. But so can individual experience. But "data" is often used as the truth.
So yeah individual experience here is valid. Hunger is not as simple as every hour you eat you get more hungry, and that's valid to deduct from personal experience.
I don't know who is labeling their observations as "analysis" other than you. It's reasonable to question a study's methodology, especially when the judges in question were fasting as a part of Ramadan. And including one's own experience as an addendum is completely reasonable too.
There’s no single experience of thinking yet I can say everyone has thoughts. Thoughts about what? _That_ is what varies. The body is similar, it speaks through signals to the brain. The only way to know your body’s voice is by doing. Dismiss your notion that individual experience has no value.
I always wondered about the original study whether they controlled for the fact that courts control their case calendars. I can't count the number of times I've had a client's case shuffled to the back of the line because the judge didn't want to deal with it (or wanted to make me or the client wait longer).
Also, Muslim countries commonly offer amnesty or executive clemency at the Eid to people who have been convicted of crimes, so that's something else to correct for/think about. For example, if I am a judge adjudicating a case for theft and I know that the defendant will be pardoned on the Eid, I might acquit or pronounce a light sentence. This is a different issue than the sibling comments RE spiritual reflection, more like a concession to a larger policy imperative.
Edit to add that state sponsored leniency at the Eid is likely happening in Pakistan but not India.
I'm a daily faster for the past 20 years, so I can attest (anecdotally) to the benefits of working while hungry. Once you adapt, after a couple weeks, instead of being irritable when hungry, you mind feels clear and focused. After all, despite the trappings of modern society, we are a predator species. Hunger gets shit done.
When I was a kid, I recall the teachers always telling us to have a good meal before a test. Even then I felt that was silly, as a big lunch always gave me brain fog.
Anyway, I'm surprised this article (study?) didn't take into account "meeting fatigue". I know that for myself, after an hour in a meeting, I just want to get out so I can recharge. I know nothing productive will happen until I do so.
You also can't take the Ramadan as a normal fast. This is a religious rite that might actually inspire more forgiving behavior becausenot its religious nature.
Comparing the effect of different fasting duration only across judges who fasted during Ramadan most likely removed the influence of religion-inspired forgiving behavior.
This might be the dumbest article I've ever read. It ought to be shockingly obvious that "hunger" associated with people who know what to expect and who do it regularly as a practice is going to be miles different from someone who ate that day and is dealing with different levels of e.g. blood sugar and whatnot.
The conclusion I get from both studies is that small influences can have very large effect on judges ability to give out sentences. If Muslim judges are 10 per cent more likely to acquit a defendant for every additional hour of fasting they experienced, and that decision according to the study is more accurate, then Muslims shouldn't be making sentences outside of that effect. For non-Muslim judges there is no difference so no need to apply the same restrictions.
I suspect that such conclusion would apply much too great significance to that study.
I'm very open to the possibility that the original 'hungry judges' study was flawed — many such studies don't stand up to scrutiny, let alone replication, and we should usually not give them a lot of credence. That said, I don't think that the study discussed in this article is close enough to the conditions of that original study to be directly comparable.
I usually go for first appointment of the day or thereabouts. 9am-10AM if possible. Idea being they’re fresh and haven’t been worn down by seeing a lot of people already.
I never make appointments for the later afternoon. Last thing you want is someone that’s tired and trying to hurry up and get home. Also avoid Friday afternoons. I’ve heard stories that manufactured things that have serial numbers that say they were built on a Friday afternoon have a far higher warranty claim rate.
So to ensure sentences are neither too harsh nor too lenient, all trials need three judges: A Hungry Judge, A Full Judge, and An "I Could Eat" Judge. Or, at least, an emergency Snickers.
This new paper finds 10% higher likelihood to acquit per hour of fasting. That’s huge. Imagine you’re in the criminal’s shoes. The original also found a marked impact of hunger on acquittal rates.
They real story here is that a just system would have no relationship between judge hunger and acquittal rate, and both studies show human judges fall far short of that mark.
The new paper found that practicing muslim judges were more lenient on a major religious holiday involving fasting. I wish the study looked at whether the results generalized to other religious holidays without fasting.
> The original also found a marked impact of hunger on acquittal rates.
Yes, but the opposite one, and it's been completely discredited. What this article calls out as a clever gotcha is in fact obvious to any subject matter expert: case assignment isn't random. People without lawyers were scheduled for right before lunch, and that's what correlated with worse outcomes.
May I ask to the people talking about fasting on this thread:
Normally, when people talk about fasting do they literally mean to spend a long period of time not eating, or do they mean reducing the calorie intake, or both?
You can decouple them, right? You can take 12 hours a day to not eat, but make up for it afterwards.
Unfortunately, "fasting" is not specific enough. For some people, it means not eating for 6 hours or so ("breakfast" breaks the fast even if you've eaten late last night). For some people, it means >24 hours. Some people add the qualifier "intermittent" to signify that it is less than 24 hours (but done repeatedly).
You can make up for it afterwards, but usually don't. Most of the people eat way more than they need in general, and thus there is no need to "make up" for a few missed meals. If you've gotten used to it, after a fast - whether 18 hours or 240 hours - you just (slowly) resume regular eating.
You do need to be aware of refeeding syndrome, which may be triggered by jumping back to regular amounts of food after a prolonged fast though; If you haven't eaten for a few days, you shouldn't just resume your regular feeding schedule and food - you need to start with small, easily digestible (preferably, liquid/pouridge) and build up back to normal over a few days.
It’s interesting to know the effect isn’t as obvious as it originally appeared. But obviously fasting vs fed meal timing have nothing to do with each other in terms of hunger. Fasted ketosis is much different physiologically than serum glucose swings from fed meal timings.
This is the sort of thing that, if more research is done into this, has the potential to lead to pretty wide ranging challenges to previous decisions. Many courts would rightly rule that such an arbitrary decision making process is unconstitutional. Though I have a feeling such challenges would ultimately fail as those bringing the challenge would likely be required to prove that their particular adverse decision was affected by the factors talked about in this article. I would think that would be virtually impossible in most cases.
[+] [-] sternmere|3 years ago|reply
https://archive.ph/T9Y7b
[+] [-] franciscop|3 years ago|reply
> "longer fasts – and thus, presumably, greater hunger"
As anyone who has fasted for probably any reason can tell you, the longer the fast the less hungry you are overall AFTER an initial peak. Meaning, miss a meal and you are hungry, miss two and you become very hungry, but miss X* amount of meals and your hunger actually decreases. At some point you can go for days without any hunger at all.
Similar things happen with OMAD (one meal a day) fasting, which is arguably very similar to the mentioned Ramadan, the body gets used really fast* to the new regime and you stop being hungry outside the normal meal hour(s).
* the time specifics depend on many things, mainly on the type of meals you eat before the fast (e.g. sugars/carbs = worse withdrawals) and multiple other factors, but overall seems to be true this peak hunger happens and then hunger decreases.
[+] [-] wpietri|3 years ago|reply
Fasting is a common religious practice because it is both a challenge and a discipline. To get good at fasting, you have to work to unlearn habits of instant gratification and learn to consciously lean against the urgings of the body. A fasting practice develops real skills.
It's perfectly plausible to me that Ramadan-observing judges would better at judging while hungry while non-fasters would get worse. So this article's author is doing exactly what he criticizes: assuming his naive model is the only explanation.
[+] [-] jraby3|3 years ago|reply
My hunger seems to stabilize at very hungry after about two days.
[+] [-] ren_engineer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spion|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otikik|3 years ago|reply
I have been working remotely for 15 years, that’s how I like it. But the two years of pandemic with forceful social distancing were really hard.
[+] [-] ycombinete|3 years ago|reply
In Middle Eastern countries road rage incidents and reckless driving skyrocket during Ramadan. And many countries acknowledge this by all but shutting down after 1500 in the afternoon.
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[+] [-] wouldbecouldbe|3 years ago|reply
We want to understand the way things work, and correlation can give us hints. But so can individual experience. But "data" is often used as the truth.
So yeah individual experience here is valid. Hunger is not as simple as every hour you eat you get more hungry, and that's valid to deduct from personal experience.
[+] [-] d23|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] leroy-is-here|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] public_defender|3 years ago|reply
Also, Muslim countries commonly offer amnesty or executive clemency at the Eid to people who have been convicted of crimes, so that's something else to correct for/think about. For example, if I am a judge adjudicating a case for theft and I know that the defendant will be pardoned on the Eid, I might acquit or pronounce a light sentence. This is a different issue than the sibling comments RE spiritual reflection, more like a concession to a larger policy imperative.
Edit to add that state sponsored leniency at the Eid is likely happening in Pakistan but not India.
[+] [-] distantaidenn|3 years ago|reply
When I was a kid, I recall the teachers always telling us to have a good meal before a test. Even then I felt that was silly, as a big lunch always gave me brain fog.
Anyway, I'm surprised this article (study?) didn't take into account "meeting fatigue". I know that for myself, after an hour in a meeting, I just want to get out so I can recharge. I know nothing productive will happen until I do so.
[+] [-] jiggywiggy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azan_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herf|3 years ago|reply
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(23)00144... https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-prove-that-the-human-bod...
[+] [-] jrm4|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belorn|3 years ago|reply
I suspect that such conclusion would apply much too great significance to that study.
[+] [-] karaterobot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lopatin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andirk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemo44x|3 years ago|reply
I never make appointments for the later afternoon. Last thing you want is someone that’s tired and trying to hurry up and get home. Also avoid Friday afternoons. I’ve heard stories that manufactured things that have serial numbers that say they were built on a Friday afternoon have a far higher warranty claim rate.
[+] [-] Eumenes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjpnz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ultrablack|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrootabega|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomq|3 years ago|reply
They real story here is that a just system would have no relationship between judge hunger and acquittal rate, and both studies show human judges fall far short of that mark.
[+] [-] iudqnolq|3 years ago|reply
> The original also found a marked impact of hunger on acquittal rates.
Yes, but the opposite one, and it's been completely discredited. What this article calls out as a clever gotcha is in fact obvious to any subject matter expert: case assignment isn't random. People without lawyers were scheduled for right before lunch, and that's what correlated with worse outcomes.
[+] [-] omgomgomgomg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdfghswe|3 years ago|reply
Normally, when people talk about fasting do they literally mean to spend a long period of time not eating, or do they mean reducing the calorie intake, or both?
You can decouple them, right? You can take 12 hours a day to not eat, but make up for it afterwards.
And which one is the interesting one?
[+] [-] beagle3|3 years ago|reply
You can make up for it afterwards, but usually don't. Most of the people eat way more than they need in general, and thus there is no need to "make up" for a few missed meals. If you've gotten used to it, after a fast - whether 18 hours or 240 hours - you just (slowly) resume regular eating.
You do need to be aware of refeeding syndrome, which may be triggered by jumping back to regular amounts of food after a prolonged fast though; If you haven't eaten for a few days, you shouldn't just resume your regular feeding schedule and food - you need to start with small, easily digestible (preferably, liquid/pouridge) and build up back to normal over a few days.
[+] [-] stevebmark|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bandyaboot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtbayly|3 years ago|reply
Meaning, if you see a study, don’t believe it.
At least in any social science.