Surprise, the science behind our previous blog post ‘How To Play With the Psychological Lunch Effect‘ was wrong! An excellent post ‘Impossibly Hungry Judges‘ explains in detail why and gives all the necessary links to papers that show why. Still, many people use this study as a reference (and we did too as it is entrenched in popular knowledge!)
This is just another example that we need to take with a pinch of salt all those popular psychological studies. In this case, as shown in this paper ‘Overlooked factors in the analysis of parole decisions‘, there were many other factors that explain very well the order of cases during the morning and afternoon and explain better the timing: easier cases that are supported by lawyers are considered first, etc.
We know intuitively that timing and lunch may play a role, but the correlation was just too strong to be true. It is probably much weaker. This is just a reminder of how much we need to be careful between correlation and causation, and when we read about a surprising psychological study!
