Could Simple Scheduling, Not Fatigue, Explain the 'Hungry Judge' Effect?

Rather than gathering new data, this study asked a more abstract but pointed question: could a pattern that looks exactly like the 'hungry judge' effect arise from something as mundane as scheduling, with no fatigue involved at all? The author simulated judges who were assumed to behave entirely rationally, and who simply tended to avoid starting longer, more complex cases, the ones more likely to end favourably, right before a scheduled break, since those cases take longer to resolve. The simulations reproduced a declining-then-resetting pattern strikingly similar to the real data, purely from this scheduling logic, with no mental depletion built into the model whatsoever.

A simulation demonstrates that an alternative explanation is plausible and could produce the observed pattern, it doesn't prove that this is what actually happened in the original Israeli courts. What it accomplishes, alongside the Weinshall-Margel critique, is genuinely undermining confidence that the original study's striking graph is best explained by judicial mental fatigue, illustrating how a real, dramatic, and highly memorable pattern in field data can have a mundane structural explanation rather than the more compelling psychological one.