eprintid: 50727 rev_number: 8 eprint_status: archive userid: 1482 importid: 105 dir: disk0/00/05/07/27 datestamp: 2025-04-18 07:24:54 lastmod: 2025-04-18 07:25:12 status_changed: 2025-04-18 07:24:54 type: article succeeds: 22412 metadata_visibility: show creators_name: Chen, Daniel L. creators_name: Loecher, Markus creators_id: daniel.chen@iast.fr creators_idrefppn: 241586631 creators_idrefppn: 281067341 creators_halaffid: 1002422 title: Mood and the malleability of moral reasoning: the impact of irrelevant factors on judicial decisions ispublished: pub subjects: subjects_ECO abstract: Emotions are said to underlie moral decision-making. We detect intra-judge variation spanning three decades in 1.5 million judicial decisions driven by factors unrelated to case merits. U.S. immigration judges grant an additional 1.4 % points of asylum petitions–and U.S. district judges assign 0.6 % points fewer prison sentences and 5 % longer probation sentences—on the day after their city's NFL team won, relative to days after the team lost. Bad weather has the opposite effect of a team win. Unrepresented parties in asylum bear the brunt of NFL effects. The effect on district judges only appears for judges born in the same state as the current state of residence, providing clean evidence of extraneous influences on judge decision-making as opposed to lawyer or applicant behavior. Moving beyond OLS, we utilize models from machine learning to estimate the sentence length relative to the sentencing guideline. We find that while several appropriate features predict sentence length, such as details of the crime committed, other features seemingly unrelated, including daily temperature, sport game scores, and location of trial, are predictive as well. The predictive power of the unrelated events is derived from the permutation based variable importance score in random forests. We address recent criticism of the reliability of these scores with double residualization. date: 2025-06 date_type: published publisher: Elsevier id_number: 10.1016/j.socec.2025.102364 official_url: http://tse-fr.eu/pub/130477 faculty: tse divisions: tse keywords: Lawyers keywords: Sports keywords: Emotions keywords: Judicial behavior keywords: Bias language: en has_fulltext: FALSE doi: 10.1016/j.socec.2025.102364 view_date_year: 2025 full_text_status: none publication: Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics volume: vol. 116 number: n° 102364 place_of_pub: Amsterdam refereed: TRUE issn: 2214-8043 oai_identifier: oai:tse-fr.eu:130477 harvester_local_overwrite: number harvester_local_overwrite: volume harvester_local_overwrite: pending harvester_local_overwrite: creators_idrefppn harvester_local_overwrite: creators_halaffid harvester_local_overwrite: abstract harvester_local_overwrite: publisher harvester_local_overwrite: creators_id harvester_local_overwrite: place_of_pub harvester_local_overwrite: date harvester_local_overwrite: publish_to_hal harvester_local_overwrite: hal_id harvester_local_overwrite: hal_version harvester_local_overwrite: hal_url harvester_local_overwrite: hal_passwd oai_lastmod: 2025-03-31T10:39:44Z oai_set: tse site: ut1 publish_to_hal: TRUE hal_id: hal-05039084 hal_passwd: x71fczk hal_version: 1 hal_url: https://hal.science/hal-05039084 citation: Chen, Daniel L.IdRef and Loecher, MarkusIdRef (2025) Mood and the malleability of moral reasoning: the impact of irrelevant factors on judicial decisions. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, vol. 116 (n° 102364).