1. Justice is served, but more so after lunch: how food-breaks sway the decisions of judges. A study of Israeli judges holding parole hearings found that “the odds that prisoners will be successfully paroled start off fairly high at around 65% and quickly plummet to nothing over a few hours. . . . After the judges have returned from their [food] breaks, the odds abruptly climb back up to 65%, before resuming their downward slide. A prisoner’s fate could hinge upon the point in the day when their case is heard.”

“Danziger thinks that the judges’ behaviour can be easily explained. All repetitive decision-making tasks drain our mental resources. We start suffering from ‘choice overload’ and we start opting for the easiest choice. For example, shoppers who have already made several decisions are more likely to go for the default offer, whether they’re buying a suit or a car. And when it comes to parole hearings, the default choice is to deny the prisoner’s request. The more decisions a judge has made, the more drained they are, and the more likely they are to make the default choice. Taking a break replenishes them.”

“This doesn’t mean that judges make decisions arbitrarily – after all, the figures showed that rehabilitation and the likelihood of reoffending also affected the outcomes. Nita Farahany, a professor of law at Vanderbilt University, says, ‘To me, this study underscores that decision-making is complex and does not occur in a theoretical or formalistic vacuum.’ She says that similar studies have found that people from medical residents to air force pilots make more errors when they go for long periods without rest.”

More about it is here.

2. Will women marry down?, or assortative mating among humans. The majority of college graduates are now women (57% in 2011). Twenty-two percent of wives earn more than their husbands and “[t]wenty-eight percent of wives have more education than their husbands. . . . But there are several reasons to believe that our new grads will not be growing these percentages by very much. For one thing, ‘breadwinner wives,’ as women earning more than their husbands are sometimes called, are more common among couples where neither person has a college degree. For another, hypergamy, the term experts use for women marrying up, remains a powerful force in the mating market . . . As for education, the most common practice is for like to marry like, or ‘homogamy.’ According to research by Christina Schwartz and Robert Mare, homogamy has been going up, especially among the college educated. . . . Today about 55% of married couples have the same educational level. To coin a mouthful of a phrase, homogamy is replacing hypergamy.”

I’m not sure if homogamy could ever replace hypergamy, but these trends in college graduation rates have interesting (and troubling) implications for future trends such as income inequality, social class, and education, and the stability of the mating market and mating patterns.