What 1,112 Israeli Parole Rulings Say About Doing Hard Things Early

The meal arrived at the bench. A sandwich and a piece of fruit, handed to an Israeli parole judge somewhere between 9:49 and 10:27 in the morning, and for the next 38 minutes or so no prisoners were heard. According to a 2011 paper in PNAS, what happened around that sandwich is one of the most quoted facts in self-improvement: by the end of each session the judges were granting almost no paroles, and right after the break they were granting about 65%.

Does that show that willpower runs out and hard decisions belong at the start of the day? Partly no, and partly it doesn’t say. The paper’s authors measured a decline within sessions, but they could not separate eating from resting from mood, and a 2011 reply and a 2016 simulation both argue that the order in which cases appeared could produce much of the pattern by itself. What is left is a narrower and more useful claim about who controls the queue.

What did Danziger, Levav and Avnaim-Pesso actually measure?

Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav and Liora Avnaim-Pesso, in PNAS 108(17), 6889-6892 (26 April 2011), analysed 1,112 rulings collected over 50 days in a 10-month period. Eight Jewish-Israeli judges, two of them women, presided over two parole boards serving four prisons. Overall, 64.2% of requests were rejected, so roughly 36% were granted. I read the full paper (the copy hosted by Tel Aviv University).

The judges took two food breaks a day, a late-morning snack and lunch, which cut each day into three decision sessions. Plotted by position within a session, favourable rulings start near 65% and slide toward zero, then jump back to about 65% after the break. The authors’ reading: repeated rulings drain mental resources, and denying the request is the default that takes the least effort.

Their supporting detail is that favourable rulings took longer (7.37 minutes against 5.21) and came with longer written verdicts (89.61 words against 47.36). They also tested whether judges simply fill a quota of approvals and found no support for it.

The authors were more careful than the way the study is retold. They wrote that every break was a meal, so rest, mood and glucose cannot be pulled apart, that mood was not measured, and that the data cannot directly test whether justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast.”

Was the order of cases really random?

The authors argued that it largely was. Break timing was set by the judge, who did not know who was next, and case order was “with rare exception” set by when each prisoner’s attorney arrived, with attorneys sequestered in a room where they could not see the proceedings. A survey of those attorneys found they did not know about any position effect.

Keren Weinshall-Margel and John Shapard went to the courtrooms and disagreed. In a letter in PNAS 108(42), E833 (2011), they examined the original data plus 12 hearing days of their own (227 decisions) and interviewed three attorneys, a panel judge and five prison and court staff. I read the letter on PubMed Central. Three of their findings matter here:

• The board usually finishes all the cases from one prison before a break and starts a different prison afterwards, so sessions are not shuffled samples.
• Within a session, prisoners without a lawyer usually go last. They make up about a third of cases and won parole 15% of the time on Danziger’s decision rules, against 35% for represented prisoners.
• Attorneys who bring several clients choose the order, and the authors suspect they lead with the strongest case and save weaker ones for last.

They also pointed out that Danziger’s rejection category lumps in deferrals, and that the original data lacked in-prison behaviour, a factor named in Israel’s 2001 Parole Release Law, and any record of whether a prisoner had counsel.

How big is the effect once you change the assumptions?

Here is a small table of my own calculation, using figures reported in the sources above. The odds ratio compares the odds of a favourable ruling at the start of a session with the odds at the end (odds = p / (1 - p)).

Comparison	Start or group A	End or group B	Odds ratio (author’s calculation)
Danziger et al. headline, as Glöckner restates it	65%	5%	35.3
Same data without deferrals, per Weinshall-Margel and Shapard	about 75%	42%	4.1
Represented vs unrepresented prisoners, their 12 days	35%	15%	3.1

Two things stand out. Dropping deferrals alone shrinks the odds ratio from about 35 to about 4, though the decline does not vanish. And merely having a lawyer is associated with an odds ratio as large as the one left in the middle row, which is a reminder of how many things travel together with position in the queue.

Andreas Glöckner, in Judgment and Decision Making 11(6), 601-610 (2016), approached it from the other side. Favourable rulings take longer, so a judge who is perfectly rational and simply avoids starting a long case just before a break will end up placing the quick, mostly unfavourable cases at the end of sessions. His simulation (10,000 cases, a 60-minute session limit, a 36% base rate of granting) produced the same downward shape with no depletion at all, though a smaller one: a starting rate near 45% and, in a version where the judge has no foresight, a drop of roughly 15 points. He concludes that the original magnitude is overestimated, not that it is zero, and notes that the high rate at the start of sessions is hard to explain this way. His figures here come from a machine-assisted read of the article page rather than a check of every table.

What does the study not establish?

Several things the retellings assume are simply not in the data.

First, it says nothing about mornings. Sessions restart at roughly the same high rate after the snack and after lunch, so the pattern follows the time since the last break, not the clock. “Hard things first thing” cannot be derived from it.

Second, it does not show that depletion is the cause. The theory behind it, ego depletion, has fared badly in direct tests; Glöckner cites meta-analytic estimates of d = -0.10 to 0.25 and a 23-lab preregistered replication that found d = 0.04. The post on why trait willpower fails to predict follow-through goes through that replication in detail.

Third, it does not show that the judges were biased by hunger, or that anyone’s parole outcome would have changed. Glöckner reports that Danziger and colleagues replied that the downward trend held when they controlled for representation. He doubts that control fully removes the problem, since rough categories leave a residue, and the original data were not released for outside checking. So the size of the effect that survives is still open.

For the long-run version of self-control research, see what the Dunedin cohort found by age 32.

What is left of “do the hard thing first”?

Strip out the myth and three modest points remain, each of which stands on its own.

The order of a queue is something someone sets. In that courtroom it was set by when lawyers arrived and in what sequence they chose to present clients. In your day, it is set by what you let in first: email, the group chat, the easy tasks that make the hard one feel later. The advice “eat the frog first” has the same status as the hungry-judge claim, a folk rule with no traceable source that is best treated as a hypothesis about your own energy. If your sharp hours fall late because of your chronotype, the rule is wrong for you.

A boundary can matter more than a resource. Whatever happened at the break, the data show a reset point: something ended and something began. You can use that without believing in a tank that empties. Put the avoided task right after a boundary you already have.

Long cases get squeezed. The most striking thing in Glöckner’s simulation is that time management alone, with no tired brain, pushes the slow and generous decisions to the front and the quick refusals to the back. A person facing a long, uncertain task at 4 p.m. with a hard stop at 5 may quietly choose a short one instead, which looks like fatigue and is arithmetic.

That also bears on the question this blog’s readers keep asking, why they never get anywhere. Blaming character or an emptied reserve is one explanation; looking at the queue is another, and it is cheaper to test. Rearrange one week so the task you keep dodging sits directly after a fixed break and compare it with a week where it sits at the end of the day. That is a sample of one, and tells you about you rather than about judges.

For waking up, where the question is whether you are on your feet at a set time regardless of how you feel, an outside consequence that fires on schedule, as described in how DontSnooze works, does not depend on how many decisions came before it.

Other famous results have gone the same way when someone reran them under controlled conditions: power posing is the closest cousin. What stays after a correction is usually smaller than the headline, and more useful because it is smaller.